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

[Roy Bamford]

On 2021.10.14 14:40, 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 really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones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?
>
> --
> Marecki
>
>
>

Only x86 raised an eyebrow here but only one, and not very far.
It has to come sooner or later, so if not now, then when?

Datapoint: On the forums, x86 installs are either done by mistake
or by users who know what they are doing on a 32 bit SoC,
The first set of users will be helped, the second set know what they 
are doing.

In case its not clear after all that waffle, I'll go with the flow.

-- 
Regards,

Roy Bamford
(Neddyseagoon) a member of
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