Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005, Steve Langasek wrote:

> To be eligible for inclusion in the archive at all, even in the
> (unstable-only) SCC archive, ftpmasters have specified the following
> architecture requirements:
>
> [...]
>
> - the architecture must have successfully compiled 50% of the archive's
>   source (excluding architecture-specific packages)

I think this requirement by itself will kill the development of
non-Linux architectures via the following vicious circle:

(a) Lots of packages do not build because of Linuxisms in the source code.
(b) Because the architecture is not in the archive at all, people will
    probably care very little about portability bugs.
(c) Because people do not care about removing Linuxisms, the architecture
    will never reach 50% of the archive's source.
(d) Back to (a).


If we care about disk space in the mirrors, fine: Let's put the main
architectures in ftp.debian.org to be mirrored everywhere and leave
the others in someotherplace.debian.org, not to be mirrored everywhere,
but dropping architectures from the archive at all (i.e. not even
someotherplace.debian.org) when disk storage is so cheap these days
does not make much sense.

So I hope you will reconsider about the above rules.