Sven Luther wrote:
The ftp-masters are mandated by the DPL to handle the debian infrastructure, not to decide what arches debian should support or not.
This is not the case; ftpmaster's role has historically included at what point architectures can be included in the archive (and in sh's case, at what point they should be removed), and the release manager's role has included at what point an architecture is suitable for release.
For an earlyish example of an RM (in this case me) setting explicit requirements for considering an architecture for release, see:
There are four ports, any of which may want to try for a woody release: hurd-i386, mips, hppa and ia64. If they do, they need to ensure that their port has stabilised and is ready for mainstream use, that the relevant required, important and standard packages have all been ported, that they have a functioning autobuilder (or two) that can keep up with unstable (and is keeping up with unstable) and that it's built a fair chunk of optional and extra, and they need to ensure that they can get boot-floppies working in the above time frame.
-- http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2001/05/msg00003.html I'm not aware of Martin undelegating those classes of decisions.In the broader sense, of course, no the ftpmasters don't decide what architectures Debian will support -- just those that'll be supported in the archive proper. AMD64 is an example of an architecture that falls in between those two categories.
[...] and they hold us hostage [...] Friendly,
It seems odd to pretend to be friendly towards people you consider hostage takers. Or to call people you claim to be friendly towards "hostage takers".
Cheers, aj