Re: RFC: dropping armel from Debian for the upcoming release
Hello Adrian,
On Thu, 1 Aug 2024 at 09:39, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> > Should Debian drop armel from the upcoming Debian release?
>
> While I understand the reasoning behind it, also having read Arnd's mail, I don't
> understand why these decisions rarely consider the environment and sustainability
> when talking about removing support for a given hardware.
>
> ARM5vT/armel devices are still widely used for various embedded and low-energy
> applications where compute power doesn't matter but just reliability and energy
> consumption.
>
> Dropping support for these devices will mean that a lot of hardware will eventually
> be thrown away which otherwise could still have been fulfilled their purpose without
> any problems.
>
> It's certainly not easy to determine the actual usage statistics, but as long as there
> is a considerable user base, I think dropping support for hardware because it's old
> doesn't sound right to me.
The main reasoning for dropping the port are the problems listed at:
- https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
On the other hand, I find your arguments and Arnd's one about keeping
an official release with time64 library support very useful to keep
port alive one more release.
Note that dropping from stable does not mean we fully drop the port,
it can be kept as non-release architecture, then it would not block
security updates like the ones we had with linux kernel build
failures.
And for old devices (which I also still have) you can always find
unsupported releases at archive.debian.org, maybe we could have an
unofficial kernel package for those devices.
Regards,
--
Héctor Orón -.. . -... .. .- -. -.. . ...- . .-.. --- .--. . .-.
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