Re: Re-evaluating architecture inclusion in unstable/experimental
On 9/28/18 11:26 PM, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> On Fri, 2018-09-28 at 14:16 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> So, it's not always a purely technical decision whether a port
>> remains a release architecture. It's also often highly political and
>> somehow also influenced by commercial entities.
>
> Please don't make implications like that unless you can back them up.
Well, I cannot prove it. But when I see that we have ports as release
architectures with hardware where atomics in hardware don't even work
correctly and the virtual address space is limited to 2 GiB per process
while on the other hand perfectly healthy and maintained ports like
powerpc and ppc64 which have actually a measurable userbase and interest
in the community are axed or barred from being a release architecture,
then I have my doubts that those decisions aren't also driven by
commercial interests or politics.
I have seen IBM people on multiple occasions in various upstream
projects trying to remove code for older POWER targets because
they insisted anything below POWER8 is not supported anymore. In
some cases like Golang with success [1].
> Adam
> (involved to greater or lesser extent in every decision as to whether
> an architecture should be added to or removed from testing over the
> past almost decade, with no commercial interest involved in any way)
I understand that. But if stuff that gets removed despite people using
it and despite others maintaining it, I am having my doubts. And it
has happened more than once where I had to explain users why there aren't
any stable releases anymore they can install on their PowerPC-based
machines.
I really do not mean to accuse anyone of malevolence, I am merely speaking
from my personal observations that sometimes such decisions do not
necessarily meet the expectations of our users and that there might be
a path for improvement, e.g in the form of support tiers like they
exist in NetBSD.
Thanks,
Adrian
> [1] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/19074
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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