Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Marek Szuba <marecki@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Moving more architectures to ~arch only
Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2021 13:40:15
Message-Id: 8404d715-49d4-02a2-1dc9-e936485b7d72@gentoo.org
1 Dear everyone,
2
3 Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it
4 would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of
5 limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of
6 stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop
7 - hppa,
8 - ppc,
9 - sparc,
10 - x86
11 to ~arch-only status.
12
13 Note that this does NOT mean we intend to drop support for those arches
14 altogether.
15
16 There are IMHO several good reasons for this:
17 - most of the arches from this list are quite dated and either aren't
18 really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones (for
19 the record, it's been 18 years since the first amd64 CPUs came out)
20 - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in
21 case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently,
22 stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve
23 - feedback we receive, e.g. by Bugzilla, suggests that Gentoo on at
24 least some of these arches have got very, very few users
25 - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last
26 several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free
27 these days
28
29 WDYT?
30
31 --
32 Marecki

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