Re: Maintainers, porters, and burden of porting

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

* Lucas Nussbaum (lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net) [110831 12:07]:
> On 31/08/11 at 11:40 +0200, Andreas Barth wrote:
> > * Lucas Nussbaum (lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net) [110831 07:34]:
> > > 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.
> 
> First, if we are not supporting stable releases on a given arch, it also
> means that we don't need to release with exactly the same versions as on
> the other architectures. I think that it's what we did for etch-m68k.

This is equivalent to kicking out the architecture. See etch-m68k. I
don't think this is helpful in general.

If however an architecture becomes too painful to be supported, we
have already and will again in future remove support for the
architecture. See hppa during the last cycle.



Andi