I spent a lot of time in the past few months trying to fix enough of the issues with Debian/SPARC to keep it from having to be removed. Honestly the port isn't

I spent a lot of time in the past few months trying to fix enough of the issues with Debian/SPARC to keep it from having to be removed. Honestly the port isn't in terrible shape. The specific problems listed as reasons for removing it are exaggerated. GCC is not dropping 32-bit SPARC code generation and the kernel works well overall. There were a few issues causing a lot of breakage, in particular, a register corruption bug in the kernel memcpy routine and a problem with the gold linker that was corrupting string literals in certain cases. Those two bugs blocked everything depending on nettle or qt, 800+ packages. The real issue is that Debian has high expectations that take maintenance to fulfill. Particularly with the autobuilders, the machines that produce binary packages from source. When a build fails there needs to be somebody that fixes the problem. If an autobuilder crashes it can be restarted but if it's crashing every day there needs to be someone to track down the problem. If there is nobody responding to issues it's ok for a while. The people responsible for packages and the autobuilder infrastructure work around problems where they can (running old kernels) but eventually it becomes too much to ask. So I don't like this decision but it's understandable. The specific problems are exaggerated but the fundamental one isn't: nobody was doing the work to keep everything together.