Re: MySql broken on older 486 and other cpuid less CPUs. Does this qualify as RC?
On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 12:36:18PM +0200, Andreas Barth wrote:
> * Francesco P. Lovergine (frankie@debian.org) [070406 12:33]:
> > On Thu, Apr 05, 2007 at 04:10:19PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > > Like I said, in practical terms, if a bug like this in a major server
> > > package goes unnoticed until 3 days before the release, we are not actually
> > > "supporting" 486. We support the i386 architecture quite well, but it seems
> > > only honest to admit that as a project, we don't care about 486 enough to
> > > even get 486-specific problems marked as RC in time to do anything about
> > > them for a release.
> >
> > That could be fixed in R1, isn't it? I see no major problems on those
> > regards...
>
> Well, we can fix it - but are you sure that's the only package with an
> issue on 80486? I think we should put somewhere into Lenny that our code
> should still run on 80486, but it might not be QAed enough for all
> subarches (but we can discuss that later, don't need to reach a
> consensus now).
The fact that we can't say for sure is a good reason to say that we
don't "support" 486. That is to say, we can't guarantee that it will
work, because we don't have enough people who are testing on that
platform.
There is a difference between "we won't consciously break 486, and
we'll apply patches when they are called to our attention, but we
won't hold up an entire release for it", and "support". For all that
people like to beat up on Red Hat and Fedora for their supposed "lack
of quality", this is a concept which Red Hat and other commercially
supported enterprise distributions understand. If they can't test on
a platform, they don't call it supported. (And they do get help from
major system vendors to do a lot of very serious regression testing
before they say that it is supported on a particular platform.)
If we are going to claim that Debian is stable enterprise system for
servers, so stable in fact that we must use an obsolete version of
glibc compared to RHEL and SLES (even though we are releasing later
than RHEL and SLES), then it would be wise for us to use at _least_ as
stringent set of QA gaurantees as Red Hat and Novell. And if that
means that we can't say that we "support" the 486, then so be it.
- Ted
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