Re: this post is not off-topic
> Our users. Not our users of the most popular
> architectures. _all_ our users.
Please! Your last justification "we do it because it floats our boat, not
for the users" was at least honest. One of your $250 hours would do more
for "_all_ our users" if spent on a i386 than on 68k. This simple,
irrefutable fact does not make 68k users "second class citizens". If you
want to argue this, you need to go back to the original metaphor and
explain why obscure diseases deserve as much funding as those affecting
large fractions of the population.
> Do you know what motivates the developers?
I would certainly think so, since I am one professionally. And I (and I
strongly suspect most other developers) get a much bigger kick out of
doing something new that out of doing something old on an obscure
platform.
> Debian leadership? The project leader has no say in deciding
> what architectures one releases.
"No say?" That is flat-out wrong. The PL and RM may not decide alone,
but they most certainly have a say, and a large one, in what architectures
are supported. Most packagers will say "okay" to any proposed architecture
(or at least would have in the past, before the woody debacle) because
most packagers support relatively architecture-independent code. What
seems to have been missed is that the few heavily architecture-dependent
packages (e.g. XFree86) and the support infrastructure for the new
architectures would hold up the whole show. It is precisely the role of
the PL, RM, and other "meta-packagers" to recognize such structural
problems and draw appropriate conclusions.
Certainly the appropriate conclusion wouldn't be to "ban" any 68k package
someone wants to produce. But it would be to say we will not freeze the
whole damn distribution while we wait for them and the infrastructure they
require.
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