Re: Let's remove mips, mipsel, s390, ...

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> writes:

> On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 10:57:47PM +0000, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
>> Clint Byrum <cbyrum <at> spamaps.org> writes:
>> > Now, can someone please tell me how messages like the one below, and
>> > others, aren't indicative that debian should drop s390, mipsel, and
>> > maybe hppa from the list of architectures? How about we release for
>> > i386, sparc, and powerpc, and let the others release on their own
>> > schedule? This business of supporting 11 architectures and making sure
>> > they're all 100% right before releasing is just about the worst idea
>> > ever.
>> 
>> Still, the hours we maste on fixing, building, maintaining, ... code on
>> unused platforms is hysterical waste of resources. Resources we don't
>> really have.
>
> I'd like to see your numbers on how many manhours have been wasted in the
> past, say, 6 months on fixing code on unused platforms which would have gone
> into other things had those architectures not been in Debian.
>
> - Matt

Not to mention that i386 is the most non working architecture of them
all when it comes to the buildd and m68k probably the one with the
fastest responce time.

And how does having gtk not being blocked for a few days by a buildd
get ftp-master to implement t-p-u and testing-security any faster,
which is what we've all been waiting for the last 6+ month.

Not to mention the number of arm, mips, mipsel, m68k, hppa, alpha,
ia64, s390 developers that would drop away starting their own
distribution depriving Debian of manpower. A lot of bugs are found by
those extra architectures Debian supports and also fixed by their
porters. Nothing better to find bugs than a large variety.

Dropping some archs would only have one benefit. There would be mirror
space to include amd64.

MfG
        Goswin