Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only

[William Hubbs]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2021 at 03:40:02PM +0200, Marek Szuba wrote:
> Dear everyone,
>
> Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it
> would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of
> limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of
> stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
>   - hppa,
>   - ppc,
>   - sparc,
>   - x86
> to ~arch-only status.
>
> Note that this does NOT mean we intend to drop support for those arches
> altogether.
>
> There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
>   - most of the arches from this list are quite dated and either aren't
> really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones (for
> the record, it's been 18 years since the first amd64 CPUs came out)
>   - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in
> case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently,
> stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve
>   - feedback we receive, e.g. by Bugzilla, suggests that Gentoo on at
> least some of these arches have got very, very few users
>   - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last
> several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free
> these days
>
> WDYT?

For the record, I'm fine with this.

x86 being on the list sort of caught my attention, but it does seem to
fall into the superceeded category, so it should be fine.

Even though running ~arch may be mostly trouble-free, this isn't really
relevant to the discussion imo. If you run ~arch, you should be prepared
for possible breakage at any time and be able to recover from it.

William