Debian Release Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Archs

smerdyakov writes "In this story posted by Andrew Orlowski of the Register Debian Release manager Steve Langasek has announced that support will be dropped for all but four computer architectures. Among the reasons cited for doing this are improving testing coordination, 'a more limber release process' and ultimately a ('hopefully') shorter release cyle. The main architectures to survive will be Intel x86, AMD64, PowerPC and IA-64." Actually, the story says clearly that this is only a proposal at this point, but it's definitely something to watch.

Comments

Not quite accurate ..

[abrotman]

Original email

They seem to imply it is a proposal to drop the actual releasing after sarge .. They will still have support for the other architectures, but seem to imply it must meet certain criteria to be considered for release.

IMHO: requiring a level of 98% is too high and only releasing if you can still buy is rediculous. Debian still mostly compiles for 386(on x86) and it's hard to buy a 386 these days.

This is not final

[alfino]

As an active Debian developer, I simply want to state: this is anything but final and not at all decided. I am only one of many developers against the proposed scheme, and especially against the way in which the scheme was devised -- in a closed meeting with only a few select members, and completely without soliciting any input from the community.

In the long run, Debian may well have to concentrate more on some architectures than others, but a radical step such as the one proposed will probably not fly well with the community. Since our users are our top priority, you can expect many more emails on the topic before anything will happen.

misleading

[macshit]

The phrase "dropping support" is misleading. They're dropping the "stable" release for these archs. They are moved into a category called "second class citizen" architectures.

"unstable" -- which is what hacker-type individuals tend to run anyway (and is both much more up-to-date and not particularly unstable) -- will continue for all. As most of the affected archs fall into the "mostly for hackers" category, this change should have little real impact. I suppose the exception might be the sparc.

The benefit of all this is (besides, maybe, faster releases) that they have a plan for adding new scc archs easily.

[I think the "scc" archs will also not use the Debian mirror network, but probably don't have enough users to receive any real benefit from it either.]