Re: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
I would really like to see some real use cases for architectures that
want this; I'd like to spend my time on things that're actually useful,
not random whims people have on lists -- and at the moment, I'm not in a
good position to tell the difference for most of the non-release
architectures.
Sure. The idea is still half-baked. If it has merit, someone needs to
finish cooking it...
So, I'd just like to re-emphasise this, because I still haven't seen
anything that counts as useful. I'm thinking something like "We use s390
to host 6231 scientific users on Debian in a manner compatible to the
workstations they use; the software we use is ....; we rely on having
security support from Debian because we need to be on the interweb 2;
...". At the moment, the only use cases I'm confident exist are:
m68k, mips, mipsel, hppa: I've got one in the basement, and I like to
brag that I run Debian on it; also I occassionally get some work out of
it, but it'd be trivial to replace with i386.
sparc, alpha: We've bought some of these a while ago, they're useful
running Debian, we'd really rather not have to stress with switching to
i386, but whatever.
arm: We're developing some embedded boxes, that won't run Debian
proper, but it's really convenient to have Debian there to bootstrap
them trivially.
s390: Hey, it's got spare cycles, why not?
None of those are enough to justify effort maintaining a separate
testing-esque suite for them; but surely someone has some better
examples they can post...
The questions that need to be answered by the use case are "what useful
things are being done with the arch" and "why not just replace this with
i386/amd64 hardware when support for sarge is dropped, which won't be
for at least 12-18 months (minimum planned etch release cycle) plus 12
months (expected support for sarge as oldstable)". Knowing why you're
using Debian and not another distribution or OS would be interesting too.
I'm speaking only for myself; please, cure my naivety.
Cheers,
aj
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