Re: [gentoo-dev] Dropping ia64/ppc/sparc profiles to dev/exp

[Thomas Deutschmann]

On 2017-05-07 21:23, David Seifert wrote:
> TL;DR
> ia64/ppc/sparc teams are pretty much dead. They have been for a long
> time and this won't change any time soon. Gentoo should focus its
> resources on archs that are important and has the manpower to support.
> Let us please drop these 3 archs to dev profiles to ease maintenance.

+1

In security project we are currently discussing something similar. I.e.
we wanted to ask council (after talking with ATs) to drop security
coverage for sparc like we have already dropped support for ia64.

While discussing I raised the question if it isn't confusing to have

  - ~arch (testing)
  - arch (stable)
  - arch with security coverage (stable without security)

and suggested to drop the latter. Given that gentoo.org says "Security
is a primary focus of Gentoo Linux" it doesn't make any sense for me to
have a *stable* architecture without security coverage.

It isn't like security project adds any additional load to any arch
team, an architecture capable to keep up with normal keyword and
stabilization requests should also be able to keep up with security. In
other words: Any architecture lacking behind security is also lacking
behind normal keyword and stabilization procedure...

So I would highly appreciate such a change.

If we won't do something like that but will drop security coverage,
managing all the open security bugs will become very challenging because
then we will also have to track bugs where architectures with security
coverage are done but stable architectures without security coverage
blocking cleanup and things like that.

But to be clear: I am just sharing *my* view with you. I am not security
project lead so I am not speaking for the project. I guess Yury
(blueknight), current security project lead, will jump into this
discussion very soon.


-- 
Regards,
Thomas