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Re: Removing armel from the list of arches we build for



Joey Hess wrote:
I suppose you could start by considering both Raspberry Pi users and
Samsung Chromebook users. Neither may use exactly armel, but either
could be affected by this. (Raspian is probably based on armel.)
Raspbian sits somewhere between debian armel and debian armhf though probablly closer to the latter.

Raspbian uses a dpkg architecture name of armhf so it would not be directly affected by a dropping of armel from the architecture list. However when I have a bug report from a raspbian user I can't deal with myself I often ask people to try and reproduce it on debian armel and if it's reproducable there report it to debian so it's helpful to have armel as functional as possible.

There is also the issue that some people with armv6 or higher hardware may be running armel for various reasons. In particular we don't yet have a version of mono for armhf in debian.
More generally, there is a vast amount of arm systems with displays
attached. Arm was probably used mostly headless 10 years ago, but this
is increasignly not the case, and I was using webkit on arm systems over
5 years ago.
Though i'm struggling to think of any hardware that isn't at least armv6 (and therefore able to run raspbian) that people would want to use as a desktop. Even using a Pi as a desktop seems pretty masochistic to me.

The bigger question IMO though is how many reverse dependencies does the variant of webkit built by the "webkit" source package (which is only one of several webkit variants in debian) have and how strong are those reverse dependencies.


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