On 2017-11-07 11:48 +0100, W. Martin Borgert wrote: > On 2017-11-07 11:08, Julien Cristau wrote: > > Keeping armel on life support for 2 more > > years is a significant drain on DSA and our hosters, for questionable > > benefit. > > I agree, that this support comes not for free, but the benefit > is not questionable to me: There is still relevant hardware > around which can run "armel", but not "armhf". *If* there are > enough developers and build machines, there is no reason to drop > the architecture prematurely. I can't see any relevance for > ARMv4t anymore, however. Agreed. I too have armv5 hardware in daily use runing Debian (it's my house controller (solar, heating, MVHR)). For reasons of hardware additions, (but also because it works just fine), I have no desire to change it before it dies. For this use-case a proper 'stable' distro is very attractive, so being relegated to 'unstable only' in ports is less than ideal. I'm very happy if people mark problematic packages that no longer build for armv5 as 'notforus' if no-one steps up to fix them in a timely fashion, but killing the architecture because some upstreams no-longer care about v5 seems like a baby/bathwater scenario. It would be nice if we had some way to either relax the migration rules so old somewhat-maintained architectures like this didn't get in the way of others, or if there was some way of having 'stable' (or at least testing) for arches relegated to ports. Liberal use of 'notforus' would help a lot with the 'not getting in the way' part, or a way of reverting the 'used to build on this arch once so we're not going to ignore it' bit in the package migration rules. If upstream has given up and said 'we don't support that any more' then it's quite reasonable for Debian to do the same. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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