Re: Let's remove mips, mipsel, s390, ... (Was: [Fwd: Re: GTK+2.0 2.6.2-3 and buildds running out of space])

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org> writes:

> I was quoting a post with actual download numbers that actually demonstrate 
> that the vast majority of users are on i386: see http://blog.bofh.it/id_66.

But that doesn't show what you said you believe, which is that
supporting other archs slows the release.

> - available maintainer and developer time,

Easy to say.  How many RC bugs have you fixed recently, and if we
dropped the other archs, how many would you have fixed?

> - cpu cycles (witness Wouter's request to compile big packages
> rarely),

So you're saying that if we dropped the mips buildd's we'd have more
cycles for other archs?

> - network bandwith (witness the discussion on mirror efficiency),

Mirrors don't have to (and don't need to) copy all the archs.  They
can support whichever ones they want.  Nor could this possibly slow
release. 

> - mirrror capacity (witness the sad state of amd64),

But dropping an arch can't improve the capacity of a mirror which
doesn't carry it, and they can always simply not carry it if they want
to. Nor could this possibly slow release.

> - security response time (more builds to do)

Which DSAs came out later than they should have because of this
supposed delay?  Nor could this possibly slow release.

> and that it 
> - increases the load on infrastructure (t-p-u, security)

How much does it?  Do we have an infrastructure which is short on
capacity for these things?

> - scarce resource such as release managers, ftp admins, ...
> if we have to look after arches that are *not really used*.

All of whom have said that this doesn't actually slow them at all.

Thomas