Re: Upcoming changes to supported architectures
On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 08:58:12PM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> with the Lenny release upcoming we are thinking about larger changes to
> the Debian archive, of which one point is "Clean up the supported
> architecture list to free up space for new ones".
> So we had a few discussions during DebConf8 and came up with the
> following rules:
> - If an architecture fails to be included in 2 successive official
> releases, it is moved out of the official archive (and away from the
> ftp-master.debian.org host).
> - We (as in ftpteam) are happy to help in any possible way in a move
> from a no-longer-supported architecture to a different platform[1],
> like providing all neccessary files to import currently existing
> suite in the target archive (think of .changes files).
I feel I'm missing the full rationale for this change. What are the new
architectures in the pipe that space needs to be made for? For that matter,
the current ftp-master disk is 81% full, and that's with oldstable not yet
purged from the pool, something which is now long overdue; so why is any
architecture clean-up currently needed at all? If we aren't really running
into resource constraints linked to the architecture count, it's a poor use
of people's time to have to redeploy all of the ftp-master infrastructure on
a separate host.
And it's my understanding that arm is already intended to be dropped
immediately post-lenny in favor of armel. In addition, as an alpha porter
I'm of the opinion that the port should be discontinued for lenny+1, because
I no longer get any benefit at all from it (all my alpha does anymore is
take in electricity and spit out d-i daily builds + heat), so I'm very
skeptical that anyone else will benefit from it either past the end of
lenny's 2.5-year support cycle. So I think there's room for dropping
architectures here without forcibly kicking them off of ftp-master.
Is this a unanimous decision of the ftp team? You say that discussions were
had at DebConf 8, but not all of the ftp team (or even all of the ftp
masters) are present there...
> If you disagree - please provide sane alternative suggestions.
In the absence of an explanation why this change is needed, I suggest "don't
change what's not broken" as a sane alternative.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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