Re: Maintainers, porters, and burden of porting

[Andreas Barth <aba@not.so.argh.org>]

* Lucas Nussbaum (lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net) [110831 07:34]:
> Regarding architectures, we made releases with a semi-official status on
> two occasions at least (etch-m68k and kfreebsd in squeeze).

I hope you see the difference between etch-m68k and kbsd.

Kbsd is "too new", whereas etch-m68k was (at least for some time) the
last release with m68k.


> Being in the second set would be fine, and would not be a step towards
> being thrown out of Debian. Maintainers should still help porters get
> their packages ported, etc. But it would allow to relieve some of the
> pressure regarding testing migrations, for example.

This doesn't work. If the architecture isn't considered anymore for
testing migration, we'll soon end up in a state where packages are too
broken (just consider library transitions where a random package gets
build delayed). However, good news is that we are currently improving
our testing migration scripts to allow some overlap during library
transitions on all arches in most parts of the release cycle.


> I've always wondered what was the point of having some architectures
> part of stable releases as official architectures. Sure, they are very
> useful as experimental architectures, and very fun to work on, but it's
> unlikely that people will use them on production machines because the
> hardware is too old & slow, or some key piece of software is too
> unstable.

You mean like arm tablets, mipsel laptops, kbsd routers?



Andi