Re: Upcoming changes to supported architectures
On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 06:45:30PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Le Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 09:59:01AM +0200, Ingo Juergensmann a écrit :
> > I believe that changing the release scheme to not release the whole archive
> > in one release but do some sort of subreleases (base, X, database, ...) is
> > not going to be considered as "sane alternative"... ;)
> That is sad, I would love it to happen... The management of the userless
> packages on specialised arches is a time sink that in addition
> poisons the relationships between package maintainers and porters
> (or at least between me and the porters). I really think that we should
> be more user-driven for these issuses: If users want some categories of
> packages, let's work hard to provide to them. If nobody shows up...
> let's concentrate on other issues.
Well, currentlz the porters can add packages to N-F-U, which originally is
intended to store information that is not suitable for some archs, e.g.
because of missing hardware or something similar.
"Abusing" N-F-U for exclusion of "unwanted" packages is a workaround maybe,
but not a good one. Currently Debian lacks the ability to release a subset
of packages for some archs. For example I think XFCE4 would be sufficient to
most users on m68k when they want to use X11 on their machines. That means
that non-depending packages for Gnome, Wmaker, KDE could be build on a
best-effort basis and stored somewhere else on separate/willing mirrors.
If that would be possible a lot of porting work could be saved (as in
building those packages on these slower archs and dealing with bugs) that
could be spent in porting more important issues (like glibc, binutils,...).
This would, of course, break with the current "build all packages on all
archs and let the users decide" policy in some way, but it gives a better
flexibility and aims at subrelease scheme, where the archive is split up
into subsections (as they are present yet) and being able to release those
in separate release (base, important, X11, Desktop, KDE, Gnome, databases,
...).
This would benefit the users because the base system could be released every
2 years for example whereas the desktop related sections could be released
more often.
Yes, of course this means a lot of work to do and I dont know if this is
doable with the current ftp-master infrastructure, but I think it`s
solvable/doable and Debian would benefit in the long run as well.
The archive will be ever growing and dropping archs when space gets limited
is not a good solution to this problem, IMHO...
--
Ciao... // Fon: 0381-2744150
Ingo \X/ SIP: 2744150@sipgate.de
gpg pubkey: http://www.juergensmann.de/ij_public_key.asc
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