Re: Re-evaluating architecture inclusion in unstable/experimental

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Hello,

Luke W Faraone, le lun. 27 août 2018 00:33:58 -0700, a ecrit:
> So, in the first instance, would you like to continue being part of
> unstable/experimental?

Well, I can simply point at what we said last time (IIRC) the question
was raised, here are the importants point we see in being on debian
instead of debian-ports:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/05/msg00070.html


Samuel Thibault wrote for the debian-hurd team:
> * Appearing on packages' and maintainers' PTS
> pages like http://buildd.debian.org/bash and
> https://buildd.debian.org/sthibault@debian.org

This has been changed since then: debian-ports architectures show up
there.


> * Getting binNMUs from d-release transitions

I believe this is also now done for debian-ports architectures? This
really saves a lot of duplicate work for porters.


> * Appearing on http://release.debian.org/transitions/ and
> https://qa.debian.org/dose/debcheck/unstable_main/index.html
> We're fine with d-release not looking at the hurd column. But *we*
> however do look at it, and would be sad to completely lose that. It
> could be in a completely separate page or column, that would not pose
> problem.

I don't know if we have this for debian-ports?


> * Being considered as "second-class citizen"

As said at the time, this is rather already the case.



Luke W Faraone, le lun. 27 août 2018 00:33:58 -0700, a ecrit:
> As outlined on the Debian Archive Criteria page[0], the key points to
> consider are whether the architecture has been part of a stable release,
> whether it is *likely* to be part of a stable release, as well as
> whether it currently has a sensible number of active maintainers.

Considering how even quite a few Linux architectures ports are not
making it, I don't think we could say it likely that hurd-i386 be part
of a stable release.

> Whilst you may be happy to continue the work of maintaining the port
> regardless, don't forget that excess or otherwise unnecessary
> architectures involve a shared maintenance burden as well as incurring
> non-trivial requirements on mirror/Debian resources.

Concerning mirroring, it is indeed useless to mirror hurd-i386
worldwide. Considering maintenance burden, I'm a bit afraid of here
simply moving the load from the ftpmaster team to the debian-ports
ftpmaster team. I don't know the details, so can't say, I'm just Cc-ing
both teams.

> The statistics and graphs available on the debian-ports page[1] may
> provide some objective statistics or reflection on the actual
> suitability of your architecture's continued inclusion.

>  [1]: https://buildd.debian.org/stats/

Such statistics are really difficult to get any real conclusion from.
Sometimes 10% packages are missing just for one tricky nonLinux-specific
issue in one package.

Samuel