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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.
That might really hurt embedded developers. Seems like embedded users would be far more likely to use Deb than IA-64 users.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I mean, debian is the only distro that supports all the exotic architectures. If debian only supports the main architectures in futre, what then will the difference be between them and SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu and Gentoo for that matter?
While Linux is well known for being exteremly cross-platform, 99.9% of installs will be on one of those four architectures. It would make sense to concentrate solely on those four rather than adding support for every Amiga and 68XXX setup out there. Especially now with Debian becoming a very strong player in the linux server community (now that RedHat is concentrating mainly on paid contracts and has allowed Fedora Core to become bulky and buggy.)
Besides, if you really want to run *nix on your Atari go download NetBSD.
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
Aren't porting and actively supporting two different things?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm not sure how developers and users of the possible unsupported architectures would feel. I'd imagine that they would be pretty upset. There's no reason why they couldn't continue working on their respective platforms on their own, and have whatever release cycle they would like. I've seen an i586 Debian project, but I don't know how successful it is. I also know Slackware recently picked up S/390 support, and Gentoo has a wide range of architectures that it supports. Switching flavors always seems like another possible option.
The few machines sold hardly matters. HP 'claims" they will sppnd $3B on IA64 over next 5 years surely they can afford to pay for Linux on this dud of a processor.
Or better still pay the Debian guys
Help fight continental drift.
If it significantly improves the Debian release cycle, yes.
If it were the other way round, you'd hear them praising themselves on how Linux is great as it's available on all platforms.
Umm, it still would be avaiable on so many platforms. Debian is just one distribution. I'm sure there will be people who will maintain a Debian-like system for all the existing archs. All they have to do is rebuild the packages and maintain an installer for the architecture in question. They just won't be officially "Debian." But thanks for Trolling.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
THANK THE LORD!
Someone at Debian is finally getting a fucking clue. I've been telling stupid Debian zealots this for years... your distro is dying because everything has to move in lockstep. Take a look at the Linux kernel -- it's x86, and yet there are loads of ports which move at their own speed. Debian is a slug of a distro because it moves at the speed of the absolutely *LEAST* developed port. Split them off focus on the x86 distro... and let the other catch up or die off. Debian is smothering... and all the puffed up insane zealotry about how other platforms are supported just as well as x86 is worthless if your distro is 5 years out of date.
Those saying "NetBSD here I come" might like to think about what this actually means before running away screaming. Basically, it's a *proposal* to help deal with the things that hold Debian back. Nobody is talking about trying less hard to make things work on the "dropped" architectures, rather being clear that Debian is unable to support them to the degree required to provide an official "stable" release.
How many of the MIPS, m68k etc. users here are actually using plain *woody* at the moment anyway, as opposed to sarge or sid?
So how much difference will this really make?
(and if you're really dead set on *BSD, have a look at http://www.debian.org/ports under the "Non-Linux ports" and have a crack at helping get the FreeBSD or NetBSD ports working on your arch!)
Cheers,
Nick
Someone at Debian is finally getting a fucking clue. I've been telling stupid Debian zealots this for years... your distro is dying because everything has to move in lockstep.
Interesting, from where I am it seems to be pretty much alive, thank you.
Take a look at the Linux kernel -- it's x86, and yet there are loads of ports which move at their own speed. Debian is a slug of a distro because it moves at the speed of the absolutely *LEAST* developed port.
There is always sid.
Split them off focus on the x86 distro... and let the other catch up or die off.
And then the only thing that sets Debian apart from the other distros (quality, determined by lots of portability issues spotted, bad code spotted this way, lots of different archs using the same distro, etc. will be dead. People will just use Ubuntu, if they want to use something x86-ppc only.
Debian is smothering... and all the puffed up insane zealotry about how other platforms are supported just as well as x86 is worthless if your distro is 5 years out of date.
Interesting, I run Debian, with kde 3.4 over kernel 2.6.10 and my distro does not feel 5 years out of date.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
It's a good point, but then again, Debian was always the NetBSD of Linux: it ran on everything and it ran well - there's a reason for them to be so anal about the "stable" branch, it really is stable. You can always get the unstable one (which is damn fine in my experience), or move to some apt-based distro if you want to be on the bleeding edge of things.
For guys mantaining stuff like Sparc servers or developing on ARM it was a great choice.
I understand that Gentoo supports several architectures, including several (alpha, sparc) that would not be supported with this scheme. How come they don't seem to have a problem getting releases out the door? (You may not have more of a clue than I do, but perhaps someone else does.)
but it sure runs great on a Zaurus w/ a microdrive or a big SD card. Also, a lot of the software that has been ported to the Zaurus has been done by modifying the debian ARM versions. Losing support in Debian for upcoming versions would put a big hamper on porting new software to the Zaurus.
Although apt is great, the Debian Policy Manual is what makes apt (and everything else on Debian) Just Work(TM). Apt and various other dependency management tools are available for other distributions, but without a consistently applied policy no automatic tool can work the miracles that Debian's apt can.
No, they do QA for around 5,000 that a lot of people use on a lot of platforms not limited to NetBSD and its various supported platforms. pkgsrc is a great infrastructure and all the packages currently on my desktop with the exception of gyach, which is an obscure Yahoo chat client that debian doesn't support either for that matter.
apt/dpkg is neat, but I like the ease AND utility of pkgsrc. How easy is it to port the entire apt/dpkg packages tree to a new operating system? That is all of the packages available on Debian that can reasonably work on another POSIX system should be available for a quick build and install, including cross-compilation and setup if necessary. This is somewhere that, to my knowledge, Debian is still lacking. I don't even know if this would be an advantageous feature for Debian, but I know it helps me a lot maintaining various Linux, BSD, and Unix distros on various architectures.
"Debian doesn't suffer from lack of users by any stretch of the imagination."
Mostly because "suffering due to some of their fans dropping if for other distros" is an undefined concept in relation to Debian, in the mathematical sense.
But people will persist in using market driven concepts with regard to non-market driven distros, and Linux in general, won't they?
A lack of developers would be a real problem, but other than submitting bugs the number of users is simply irrelevant to the Debian development process.
KFG