Hi, Now that we have released, we need to set our goals for the future. As you probably guessed from the subject, I am strongly in favor of dropping sparc32 support for lenny. There are multiple reasons for it, including * Nearly complete lack of upstream support. David Miller, current upstream maintainer of sparc64 has expressed his thoughts on the topic in [0], triggering the discussion about dropping sparc32 support in Aurora Linux. [1] * Several serious problems, like lack of SMP support and driver failures (CD-ROMs do not work for some reason). * Shrinking userbase, flaky hardware. * Possibility to build the archive with optimization for UltraSparc processors, leading in some cases to significant performance improvements. As much as I hate to see Debian lose the support for another subarchitecture, I don't think that anything can be done about it, unless a group of determined and, more importantly, capable people, willing to maintain, fix and test it, will emerge. There is also a possibility of separating sparc32 into an unofficial project. Any thoughts on the matter will be appreciated. My intention is to come to a rough consensus (if possible), and then present our plan with regards to sparc32 to release managers. [0] http://marc.info/?l=linux-sparc&m=117407830512186&w=2 [1] http://lists.auroralinux.org/pipermail/aurora-sparc-user/2007-March/004504.html Best regards, -- Jurij Smakov jurij@wooyd.org Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/ KeyID: C99E03CC
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