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

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 03:15:58AM +0000, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
> Maybe we should pick up on Petter's suggestion of stricter buildd requirements. 
> Maybe we should only build base and essential packages for the minor 
> architectures [ after, apt-source is there for everybody to go further ].

Debian is not a source-based distribution. If people want to compile
their own packages, they usually go to one of the BSD's or Gentoo.

In the mean time, our users expect to be able to run 'apt-get install'
and be done with it. We should not break that expectation, because that
would not be in the interest of our users; we should ensure that all
software our users would want to run is available.

I agree that we should not continue to provide software for outdated
hardware platforms just for the sake of it; but as it is, there are
still people interested in m68k (some hobbyists, some embedded
developers, some who just use their old trusty hardware as their home
firewall, etc) and, I'm sure, other currently less-used hardware, so as
long as a port doesn't continually stall the release (which none
currently does; there are occasionally problems, but that happens in
every major undertaking), I see no reason to drop any port.

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