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Proposal to remove archs



I'm not subscribed to debian-boot, so I'll preface this with that fact
that I have not read any of the discussion so far, so excuse a rehash.

Simply take this in. I'm not posting to drag out any further debate, only
to add my two cents.

I think removing sparc would be a huge mistake. When people like David
Miller, who currently works for Redhat, have switched to Debian because we
support this architecture, it means a lot. Davd develops sparc64 using
Debian now.

Removing our support for the architecture only opens the door for someone
else to do so. Sparc, especially UltraSPARC, is a widely used system, and
is commonly used to install Linux on. The distribution of choice is
Debian.

Not only that but UltraSPARC has far more users, and is supported far
better by kernel developers than other architectures that are slated to
remain in the list.

ia64 is near death. Even Intel is waving the white flag on it. PowerPC,
while great, is mostly for hackers. Most people don't by a PowerMac to
install Linux on, and those non-Mac PPC machines mostly have to do with
embedded development, and not a userbase.

That's the end of my pro-sparc rant. Hate to see ideas like this even hit
the floor. How about pruning packages rather than architectures? Cleaning
us out of cruft has far more usefulness than removing official support for
architectures. The package list grows at a far greater rate that our
architecture list, and consumes far greater resources than any single
architecture.

Remove one architecture, and you remove an entire userbase. Remove 10% of
our least used packages and I bet you wont lose but a handful of users.

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