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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.
Is it April the 1st already?
"Affected Admins Propose Dropping Debian"
Seeing as they're the major systems out there. But IA-64? I've barely heard of that, and TFA says Microsoft dropped XP for that. Can anyone elaborate as to why this one was kept?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
so i won't have debian in my toaster????
well, I can still be using NetBSD. Of course the toaster runs it!
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.
...there goes my handy Sparc server...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Thanks a lot! This was about time, or else we would never get a new stable release. Lets just hope thats it gets further then just beeing an proposal...
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?
In other news, the NetBSD team announced that they have successfully ported NetBSD to the abacus...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I just managed to find some spare time to finish my Debian m68k install on my fellow Amiga 1000 and now they're going to drop support? Argh...
Can't wait to get my hands on the new, stable 2.2 kernel!
Oh, wait...
"Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold." -- Joseph Chilton Pearce
This isn't about the kernel, it's about the distro. Linux won't stop running on other systems, Debian's just not going to support them. Maintaining a distribution on so many architectures is a lot of work that doesn't yield a very high return, and dropping the less common ones is really a very smart move.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
So the question becomes, who will bother supporting non-mainstream hardware? They are still functional machines for me...
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
Original email
.. They will still have support for the other architectures, but seem to imply it must meet certain criteria to be considered for release.
They seem to imply it is a proposal to drop the actual releasing after sarge
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.
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.
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.
echo mailto: !#^."<*>"|tr "<*> mailto:" net@madduck
Well, I'm sure Debian has their reasons, but I suspect they're suffering due to some of their fans dropping it for other distros. Late releases, stupid politics and aged packages isn't doing this distro any justice.
As for their decision to drop SPARC, good.. I ran Debian on my SPARC boxes for a few years, and it was garbage. Slow, clumsy and at times a few bad packages got in causing problems. Debian for SPARC made Solaris look like a rocket ship.
For all you SPARC users, switch to Gentoo (Running it and loving it) or support one of the other SPARC distros like Splack (Slackware-based SPARC distro).
It's called Ubuntu.
PowerPC is stuck with a crappy old pre-NPTL glibc
because of the feature freeze. Making PowerPC be
unofficial would allow this to get fixed.
Heck, drop every port but x86. It's not nice how
the x86 port drags around the others by the
release cycle.
Will dropping support for other than the four major platforms (if it's done) split the Debian developers into two or more groups, one developing Debian for the major platforms and the other(s) specializing on some other platform, for example ARM?
is that only those 4 archs will be actively supported in Debian _releases_. Other architectures will still exist and maintained but not be included in the shifts from unstable->testing->stable.
If it's that it might be a good things, granting the more popular(?) architectures a smaller turnaround time for stable releases.
Or maybe hell freezes over.
Perhaps Debian isn't trying to address the embedded segment.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Not at all. The IA-64 is Intel's Itanium architecture which was massively redesigned. It is not compatable at all with x86 or AMD64 and is actually closer to the PowerPC, as both are RISC chips. The Itanium hasn't done very well (IBM just stopped selling it for their own POWER arch) but it it still used, and probably is at least #4 on servers.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
So much for running Linux on Bubba the Big Mouth Bass. That was my dedicated firewall too!
The Peanut Gallery, Ubergeek, Biblically Sober
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What thought process led to IA64 being favored over the various flavors of sparc?!? It probably involved a lot of vodka.
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
I've never understood why the kernel can't be seperated from the distribution. If all applications were written on top of a platform like java or php or whatever, couldn't the kernel come from anywhere and if there was support for the application platform apps would run?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I first read that as "Debian Release Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Acid"
Okay, so a philosopher, a philologist, and a philatelist walk into a bar...
gentoo runs quite a few mips architectures.. check out their support here:l
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/mips-requirements.xm
Gentoo supports at least as many architectures as Debian. A cursory glance at packages.gentoo.org will tell you that.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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
Why bother keeping IA-64? Debian has more alpha users than ia64. There are more SPARC users. Heck, there are even more HPPA users than ia64 users. All the details are available at the Debian Popularity Contest.
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.]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Debian will continue supporting the rest of the architectures... but only in the unstable tree.
All the users running rare platforms can continue using debian, and upgrading their distribution, but they won't have a stable release.
I think this is the way to go...
Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Archs
:-)
That's good. Fewer trips to McDonald's will result in a healther staff.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I've always felt that one _major_ factor in Debian's ridiculously long release cycles was supporting lesser-used architectures. Glad someone up the food chain feels the same way.
Nosce Te Ipsum
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.
If everything was well-written and accounted for differing word lengths, byte orders, etc. then we wouldn't be having this conversation. Unfortunately, that's not the case. On the plus side, Debian's dedication to platform equality means that a lot of bugs get exposed (and fixed) that no one would ever know about if the world only ran x86. This is a good thing for everyone, even those where that software already worked as expected.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Even the trolls can't be bothered to read the damned thing. Debian will still be available on all those plaforms, but Debian Stable won't be after Sarge releases.
If this proposal passes.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Debian runs pretty well as the Familiar distro for iPaqs, on the ARM platform. It's that kind of cross-platform support that makes Linux so interesting, and keeps the embedded platforms such exciting targets for development: recompile apps developed by such a large, general-purpose community. Embedded apps are a much more exciting platform for developers, because of the huger market and wide-open opportunities as it gets started. Debian, don't blow it!
--
make install -not war
This has been floating around the debian-sparc mailing list all day... there seems to be quite a few pissed off users...
I suppose that if the Debian devels are pig headed enough to have a meeting like this without inviting anyone from the sparc community, it really says something about what users they care about.
I've been saying for years that Debian/GNU is _the_ Server OS. A look at the proposed Arch support would leave one to believe that they want to re-vector themselves as _the_ desktop os.
The slow and steady release schedule that debian has stuck to is great for server and other enterprise uses but does leave a bit to be desired for the desktop, look at the void being filled by ubuntu, progeny and mepis on the desktop.
I suppose I knew this day was coming, #gentoo-sparc currently is a better source of tech support than #debian-sparc is on freenode....
I really didnt want to switch to gentoo, but unless I want to go the BSD route that seems to be the only viable option.
Can someone send me a 4x5" gentoo sticker that I can use to cover the red swirl sticker on my truck?
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
Sure... 4004->8008->8080(->8085??)->8086->80286->IA32
But I am not sure where you're getting your PowerPC storyline from. AFAIK POWER1 grew out of the ROMP processor used in IBM RT-PC machines (precursor to RS/6000). PowerPC project spawned from the POWER project, AFAIK, but with the 970 whatever differences the two architectures had have apparently disappeared.
As an embedded linux developer (who has worked on both ARM and MIPS), I can tell you that for a production, shipping system, it doesn't matter. You'll almost always end up rolling together your own thing. However, when a vendor (e.g. Cirrus Logic) has an evaluation board (e.g., EDB9315) that comes with a hard drive with Debian loaded on it and you can see that X11 works with the framebuffer driver and USB keyboards and mice work and network apps work, it's very impressive. Most imporantly though it verifies that the drivers (framebuffer, usb, ide, serial, network, pcmcia, CF, et cetera) are implemented in a standard way and will work with "off the shelf" linux apps. This makes things amazingly easier than with other companies whose linux ports are not as complete or functional. And if you're a small company doing an embedded Linux project, it's much better to go with a System-on-Chip processor from a vendor that provides a good Linux port and good Linux drivers than it is to either do your own or write your own drivers.
However, it is sometimes very useful to use a full system like this to do native compiles of your applications (instead of cross-compiling) and native debugging. Of course, when you move to your custom hardware, you usually have to drop all that nice stuff.
(By the way, I am really a big fan of the Cirrus Logic 93xx series system-on-chip processors. After working on two other ARM SoC systems and one MIPS system, the Cirrus 9315 was by far the best supported.)
My other first post is car post.
Hey, if you guys would just read the actual announcement from Steve: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005 /03/msg00012.html
You would see that support is NOT being dropped. Rather, the proposal just allows the common architectures to be released before the uncommon ones are fully tested. This seems like an excellent plan, rather than having to wait forever for Debian releases.
I see from the list of ports that they include only one MIPSs port, while Debian includes two: "mips" and "mipsel" (little endian). They are binary incompatible and run on entirely different hardware. Big-endian MIPS runs on SGIs and such while little-endian MIPS runs on Decstations and such.
I don't know which Gentoo has, but it doesn't have both.
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I've got an old sparc classic running a load of woody that was installed in June of `01. It runs great for a 50MHz sun4m with 72MB of ram that is up 24/7. I suppose I will still be happy with it if it caught on fire and didn't unmount my filesystems before powering off. Thanks to Debian I have had several years of enjoyment out of a machine that was not at all enjoyable previous to becoming a penguin.
If rajr bites the dust, he will likely be replaced by a newer, faster, x86. I would be compelled to run something newer than woody on this machine.
So I will be moving on to something more mainstream in my little home user world. I think this bears some resemblence to what is happening in the business world in terms of replacing older, not-so-common hardware and software(where applicable).
Whatever happens I'll (thankfully) still be able to enjoy free software.
-Bill
Bugs that are not apparent under the operating conditions of one platform become very apparent under those of another, for one thing. Also, different timings present in different hardware can uncover the strange situations that result from erroneous multitasking programming. Infrequent intermittant problems become more noticeable, and therefore get fixed.
I hope Debian doesn't choose to drop other architectures.
You're kidding, right? Pretty much everyone involved in IA-64 is pulling out; all the IA-64 workstation vendors have stopped making workstations, Windows for IA-64 has been officially put out to pasture. The hardware (what there is) is still so expensive, it's ridiculous. No one's developing for it - everyone's using x86_64 ("x64", as Sun and MS are calling it). I really would have to agree that SPARC support would be more worthwhile.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
I'd like to install it too?
;-) but fit into an A1000 and can be bought cheap at ebay..
I didn't get around, I just installed an mtec 500/030 board, they're not fast (3 bogomips
Most of the smaller distros out there are really Debian with a bunch of stuff stripped out and replaced with Busybox and whatever tools make sense for the target environment (security, system repair, media players, etc.) A few of them are more minimal roll-your-owns, and the embedded world also has the uCLinux crowd and vendors like MonteVista, but there's a huge amount of Debian usage in the small/medium appliance world.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Maybe it would make sense to have different types of Debian GNU/Linux for tiny devices, desktops and servers.
After all, it makes as little sense to have KDevelop running on m68k as having a Gaim package for s390.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I would be a victim of that decision - I run Debian on my Amiga3000 just for the fun - but I still say "go for it".
That proposal aims for stable releases. I see no problem seeing an unstable m68k debian popping up after some time. Right now even the stable m68k-Debian is a rotting piece of shit not working at all so why bother with stable at all?
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair