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Debian Release Mgr. Proposes Dropping Some Archs

Posted by timothy on from the notion-that-could-become-an-idea-and-maybe-a-concept dept.

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.

65 of 377 comments (clear)

  1. The hell? by Lisandro · · Score: 5, Funny

    Is it April the 1st already?

    1. Re:The hell? by temojen · · Score: 4, Funny

      On April 1st NetBSD would be the one saying they'll only support 4 architectures.

    2. Re:The hell? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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up insane zealotry about how other platforms are supported just as well as x86 is worthless if your distro is 5 years out of date.

    3. Re:The hell? by Lisandro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  2. The real headline.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Affected Admins Propose Dropping Debian"

    1. Re:The real headline.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's like dropping acid, except you hallucinate that you're in an endless hallway, walking towards a light at the end called a 'major version release', while a vicious kid named Sid is whipping you.

  3. Those would be the good ones to keep... by thepotoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      For IA64, kernel, toolchain and libc are maintained by upstream, and Debian itself has sufficient IA64 know-how, as well. That's why it's practical to keep it.

    2. Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If this is the case, though, I wonder why Sparc is being dropped.

      SPARC has barely any upstream support in the kernel. kernel.org kernels are frequently broken. What's worse, Debian hasn't got a SPARC maintainer right now.

    3. Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... by Cramer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I beg to differ. As a sparc/linux user and kernel hacker, the linux kernel is supported on sparc (sparc64 at least, sparc32 really is some dead-end hardware.) Granted, there aren't 10,000 developers maintaining it -- there doesn't need to be -- but it is maintained. The live development kernel (bitkeeper) has been usable for a very long time on sparc. So, either you aren't using sparc/linux, you're on sparc32 hardware, or you're just very unlucky. For the record, there are many x86 users that are frequently broken, too.

      The lack of a SPARC maintainer is a concern, but one that can easily be addressed. (politics aside.)

    4. Re:Those would be the good ones to keep... by Anne+Honime · · Score: 4, Interesting
      However, sparc far better supported in NetBSD and OpenBSD then it is in Linux.

      Why use linux on sparc 32 in 3 letters : SMP.

      Fine hardware, dead cheap, and NO bsd was up to it (until recently, if it happens to work now).

      Debian back out in that area is a stab in the back for any user.

  4. nooooooo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    so i won't have debian in my toaster????

    well, I can still be using NetBSD. Of course the toaster runs it!

    1. Re:nooooooo by Quantum+Fizz · · Score: 3, Funny
      so i won't have debian in my toaster????

      If by toaster you mean a 3GHz x86 CPU, which gets hot enough to almost be a toaster, then you're in luck.

  5. Dropping ARM??? by LWATCDR · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Dropping ARM??? by pavon · · Score: 4, Informative
      Actually, they didn't make a decision to cut or keep any particular distros, contrary to how the summary makes it sound. The actual email is worth reading.

      The way I understood it was that each architecture would continue to be included in unstable, but when time came to release stable, the architectures that were not up to snuff would not be included in stable. In other words, they are not going to hold off on releasing stable for the architectures that are ready just because some other, less actively devloped ones are not. This seems fair. If someone wants their favorite architecture to be included in the next stable release then they can volenteer to get it up to stable quality, or commit themselves to maintaining it (security patches) after it is released. Otherwise they can just keep using the unstable. This is better than forcing everyone to use unstable, by holding debian back from releasing stable on a timely basis.

      The second set of requirements (for SCC) also make sense. If you have less than 50 users, or cannot support the infrastructure needed make mirrors, there is no reason that all the ftpmasters should have to mirror a full branch of code for you - it is overkill. Those 50 people can get together set up their own apt-get repository for their binary packages.

      There are several things that I did not like about this plan however, like the non-merit-based requirement, of requiring a machine to be purchasable new. If there are people that are willing to do the work, who cares if the machine is in production or not.

      I also don't like the fact that there is no official option for the less active arch's to make stable releases uncoupled from the main stable timescale. Suppose that a minor arch, has enough support to do a stable release every 3 years compared to the x86's 18 month cycle. Choosing to target every other stable release won't work because while there is twice as much time between releases the bottleneck is the time between feature freeze and release, and that will still be determined by the x86 team's (faster) schedule. Furthermore, all the stable releases for all the architectures really should have the same package versions. This will save effort supporting the releases in the future (security patches etc), and keep user confusion down to a minimum. One possible solution would be if they kept the requirements listed, but did not require them to be met at the same time as the x86 branch - let the architectures enter stable when they are ready, with a time limit of say 2 or 3 release cycles of the x86 branch.

      In general, requiring all the architectures to walk in lockstep is a real problem that debian needs to fix, but they should do so in a manner that allows the less active architectures to continue to have stable releases at their own pace, while not holding back the x86 line.

  6. Well... by Pflipp · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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]
  7. About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

  8. As anal as Debian is, this is kind of sad. by theolein · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:As anal as Debian is, this is kind of sad. by Kimos · · Score: 3, Insightful

      apt

      That's what drew me to Debian, that's what keeps me with Debian.

    2. Re:As anal as Debian is, this is kind of sad. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
      Ok, then, decent apt repositories.

      I have debian on servers and suse on desktops at work; and while I believe we have everything apt for SuSE set up correctly with all the popular apt repositories; you still get a tiny fraction of the packages.

    3. Re:As anal as Debian is, this is kind of sad. by misleb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In my experience, apt is not the same when implemented on other dists. One the surface the commands are the same, but the integration isn't there. Neither are the normal debian repositories. Like you can't upgrade the whole system with apt-get dist-upgrade.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
  9. In other news... by Jon+Abbott · · Score: 5, Funny

    In other news, the NetBSD team announced that they have successfully ported NetBSD to the abacus...

    --
    Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
    1. Re:In other news... by Thud457 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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

    2. Re:In other news... by emidln · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  10. Damn... by nick-less · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...

  11. Hooray "limber release process!" by Look+KG486 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

    1. Re:Hooray "limber release process!" by Look+KG486 · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Wow, I was almost certain Debian stable was up to 2.4 by now. I'm sure it's a well-maintained 2.2 kernel with backports aplenty, but I'm stunned my wisecrack was actually true. I see some 2.4.x kernel-images in the list for Woody though.

      Last release was 19 July, 2002. While one can apt-get his way to modern times, I have to believe an annual release (or more frequent) will only help bring in fresh users.

      FWIW, I run Gentoo with a 2.6 kernel. I have issues from time to time, but they get ironed out with a little patience. There's always someone in the community that has an answer and very often, a solution.

      It seems Linux and its distributions are at a minor crossroads where stable releases and unstable, bleeding edge releases meet. On one hand you want to get new features out to users so they can test them and the software can be refined, but now that Linux is finding its way into production environments and a few desktops, bugs can be real backbreakers.

      --

      "Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold." -- Joseph Chilton Pearce

  12. Older Hardware by nairnr · · Score: 3, Interesting
    My basement has become a repository for some older machines. I had chosen debian for a couple, noticeably a HP-PA machine, and my I had a few Sparc 2, IPX boxes. Debian was my distro of choice because they still supported these machines. My Alpha is running an older version of RedHat when it was still supported.

    So the question becomes, who will bother supporting non-mainstream hardware? They are still functional machines for me...

    1. Re:Older Hardware by goofyspouse · · Score: 3, Funny

      "So the question becomes, who will bother supporting non-mainstream hardware? They are still functional machines for me..."

      Sweet christ...move out of mom's basement and learn what it is like to kiss a girl. There is ZERO reason to keep these ancient systems running. Recycle the things or donate them to a museum.

  13. Scary but beneficial by caryw · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  14. Not quite accurate .. by abrotman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  15. Seems fairly reasonable. by MurkyWater · · Score: 3, Insightful
    As the article mentions there's been a lot of debate since the proposal was posted. I don't think that it is a completely unreasonable proposal. From what I've seen, there is too much time between releases, and this does seem as if it would speed things up a little, due to the lower amount of testing necessary.

    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.

  16. IA64? by bstadil · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Why not let HP and Intel carry the support banner for IA86.

    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.
  17. This is not final by alfino · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:This is not final by Ulric · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I'm not a Debian user, but I understand that the long release cycles are viewed as a problem by those who are. Do you think it will be possible to solve that problem without dropping a few architectures, and if so, how?

      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.)

  18. Debian.. PFHT.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

    1. Re:Debian.. PFHT.. by kfg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "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

  19. Don't we already have that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's called Ubuntu.

  20. So what thing might mean by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  21. What about ARM ? by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    By the end of this year, the majority of Linux systems will be cell phones and settop boxes/ digital TV etc running on ARM and PowerPC architectures .... not x86. I would have thought that keeping ARM would be a GoodThing.

    Perhaps Debian isn't trying to address the embedded segment.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
    1. Re:What about ARM ? by misleb · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Perhaps Debian isn't trying to address the embedded segment.

      Consider that a minimum Debian installation is over 100MB. Debian is definitly not aimed at embedded systems. Never was.

      -matthew

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    2. Re:What about ARM ? by selfabuse · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  22. IA-64 vs AMD64 by cbr2702 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:IA-64 vs AMD64 by geneing · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I wouldn't say that IA-64 is similar to RISC chips. If anything the VLIW paradigm is exactly the opposite of RISC.

    2. Re:IA-64 vs AMD64 by flaming-opus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That's not exactly true either.

      The real paradigm shift of commercially released risc processors wasn't a simplified instruction set (they may have once been simple, but that's definately no longer true). The real difference is a consistent addressing schema and a load/store architecture. EPIC, the instruction set architecture of the itanium, does this also.

      In fact, if you read each instruction sequentially out of ia64 bundles, each could be an instruction on a hypothetical risc processor. This defeats some of the purpose of the ISA, but is technically valid. I have to agree with the previous poster who suggested that the itanium is risc-like. It is. It's a rather-wide risc processor whose pipe-line control logic is part of the compiler, rather than embeded in hardware. Everything else in the itanium could be added to a risc processor except for the back-wards compatibility thing. (rolling register window, predicated execution, speculative loads, etc)

  23. Damn. by gt_swagger · · Score: 5, Funny

    So much for running Linux on Bubba the Big Mouth Bass. That was my dedicated firewall too!

    --
    The Peanut Gallery, Ubergeek, Biblically Sober
    NCAAbbs.com: Thousands of fans, Hundreds of teams, Just one place
  24. IA64?!? by Yonder+Way · · Score: 3, Funny

    What thought process led to IA64 being favored over the various flavors of sparc?!? It probably involved a lot of vodka.

  25. Re:Now... by misleb · · Score: 3, Insightful
    ... [Linux] zealots are gonna console themselves on this.

    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
  26. Posted by Timothy (Leary?) by Mr.Progressive · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...
  27. Re:drop me too! by r00t · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's not a joke. Dropping a port from "official"
    status means that the port is free to ignore the
    normal release cycle. The normal release cycle is,
    predictably, controlled by the x86 majority.

    Once free of such tyranny, the non-x86 ports can
    fix things without concern for x86 releases.

    I'm a Debian user with PowerPC, and I'd love to
    have a modern glibc. The upcoming release isn't
    worth much on PowerPC right now, because it's still
    using the old pre-NPTL LinuxThreads hack.

  28. Re:NetBSD, here I come by glen604 · · Score: 4, Informative

    gentoo runs quite a few mips architectures.. check out their support here:
    http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/mips-requirements.xml

  29. Excuse me? by Nasarius · · Score: 4, Informative

    Gentoo supports at least as many architectures as Debian. A cursory glance at packages.gentoo.org will tell you that.

    --
    LOAD "SIG",8,1
  30. Re:NetBSD, here I come by monsterlemon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  31. I disagree wholeheartedly. by hummassa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:I disagree wholeheartedly. by Usquebaugh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      >> Interesting, I run Debian, with kde 3.4 over
      >> kernel 2.6.10 and my distro does not feel 5 years
      >> out of date.

      I would guess you're not running stable or testing but unstable. I run testing and it's too far behind the idea of release early and often. I'll probably go to unstable this evening.

      Debian takes too long to do releases. It's not NetBSD it should change to a tiered release structure. The four mentioned are a good idea.

      In short the time frame between Debian releases is indefensible, it takes to long.

    2. Re:I disagree wholeheartedly. by noahm · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Interesting, I run Debian, with kde 3.4 over kernel 2.6.10 and my distro does not feel 5 years out of date.

      Sure, you run sid. You know what that means? It means that this proposal won't affect you at all. (additionally, I'm sure you run x86, along with what, 98% of all other debian users?)

      The thing is, you're the type of user who doesn't need predictable release cycles. You can get by on the bleeding edge and run software for which a new package release may be uploaded on any given day.

      A lot of Debian users are in very different positions. I, for example, run Debian in an enterprise environment, with literally hundreds of servers and workstations. woody is simply not an option in this environment. Hardware support (both kernel and user space) is dreadfully lacking, and we'd have to backport most of the software we use every day anyway. We'd end up running something so bastardized that we'd no longer see many of the benefits of running Debian at all. So we were forced to go with something more current. We chose sarge, with the understanding that we'd have to be responsible for the security of our systems, with little help from Debian. But of course, there are problems there, too. Sarge changes every day. A machine installed today may look nothing like a machine installed tomorrow. Additionally, we simply have no way of knowing when sarge will be released. The saying within Debian has always been "we'll release when it's ready", but of course, there's never a published metric for readiness, so there's simply no way of knowing when that will be.

      Basically, right now, Debian really doesn't have a good release for enterprise users. That really sucks, since IMHO Debian provides a software infrastructure that makes it really appealing for large scale deployments. I really hope this new proposal is a step toward a shorter and more predictable release cycle!

      noah

      (Debian developer, sysadmin, and user since 1997)

    3. Re:I disagree wholeheartedly. by Kent+Recal · · Score: 4, Informative

      A machine installed today may look nothing like a machine installed tomorrow.

      You may want to take a look at FAI (Fully Automatic Installation - google will find it). We've been using it quite successfully for that kind of maintenance.

      You basically set up a local debian mirror (snapshot of the real tree) and use it to deploy your machines (FAI does it great) and as only apt-source for them. Whenever it's time to update a pkg you test it, then just drop it to your mirror where the clients can pick it up via apt-get upgrade.

  32. Why keep IA-64? by James+Youngman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  33. misleading by macshit · · Score: 5, Informative

    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....
  34. Debian will mantain support for the rest of arch's by Poldark · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  35. Not apt... by mwa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  36. Re:Why can't the kernel be seperated from the dist by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 4, Informative
    My understanding is that it isn't so much the kernel (although that's certainly an issue) as the userspace applications. For example, going from 32 to 64 bits breaks a lot of badly-written software, as does that annoyingly still-present issue of endianness. Debian currently treats all platforms as equal, meaning that a problem compiling X.org on some weird 48-bit middle-endian system used by 15 people can delay including that package on x86 and x64 as well.

    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?
  37. Re:Now... by Qzukk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  38. well... by Cryptnotic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  39. Arches will NOT be dropped - misleading article by gb006k · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.