Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 12:06:08PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> >>I would really like to see some real use cases for architectures that
> >>want this; I'd like to spend my time on things that're actually useful,
> >>not random whims people have on lists -- and at the moment, I'm not in a
> >>good position to tell the difference for most of the non-release
> >>architectures.
> >Sure. The idea is still half-baked. If it has merit, someone needs to
> >finish cooking it...
>
> So, I'd just like to re-emphasise this, because I still haven't seen
> anything that counts as useful. I'm thinking something like "We use s390
> to host 6231 scientific users on Debian in a manner compatible to the
> workstations they use; the software we use is ....; we rely on having
> security support from Debian because we need to be on the interweb 2;
> ...". At the moment, the only use cases I'm confident exist are:
>
> m68k, mips, mipsel, hppa: I've got one in the basement, and I like
> to brag that I run Debian on it; also I occassionally get some work out of
> it, but it'd be trivial to replace with i386.
>
> sparc, alpha: We've bought some of these a while ago, they're useful
> running Debian, we'd really rather not have to stress with switching to
> i386, but whatever.
>
> arm: We're developing some embedded boxes, that won't run Debian
> proper, but it's really convenient to have Debian there to bootstrap
> them trivially.
>
> s390: Hey, it's got spare cycles, why not?
>
> None of those are enough to justify effort maintaining a separate
> testing-esque suite for them; but surely someone has some better
> examples they can post...
I think the main reply is for developers using said archs. they need to have a
solid base to work on, and unstable is not it, with large chunks of it being
uninstallable for a longer period of time (and this happens even on powerpc,
which is a faster arch), so killing testing gives the developer (or whoever
uses this arch) no real way of doing a clean install or maintaining a working
setup on these arches, so removing testing is a self-fullfilling prophecy that
they will die soon.
> The questions that need to be answered by the use case are "what useful
> things are being done with the arch" and "why not just replace this with
> i386/amd64 hardware when support for sarge is dropped, which won't be
> for at least 12-18 months (minimum planned etch release cycle) plus 12
> months (expected support for sarge as oldstable)". Knowing why you're
> using Debian and not another distribution or OS would be interesting too.
But that would not be debian anymore, at that time i wonder if a fork would be
the only solution, and if this x86-centric distribution that will emerge from
it will be fit to keep the debian name.
What percentage of our developers come from alternative arches, and what
amount of work and good quality maintainers will we loose if we kill these
arches ? And can we afford that ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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