| |||||||||||||
Misleading title. . .Misleading title. . .Posted Mar 14, 2005 20:42 UTC (Mon) by topher (guest, #2223)Parent article: Debian proposes dropping most architectures
This has a very misleading title.
Debian is not planning to, or even considering to, "drop" most architectures. What they're likely going to do is stop trying to produce a synchronized stable release for all architectures. Debian currently supports 11 architectures (for Sarge), and the fact is, it's too much. The time and effort required to get all of the architectures into a releasable state at the same time is one of the primary factors that keeps Debian releases as spread out as they are.
By selecting a handful of primary architectures (x86, PowerPC, IA64, and AMD64 (personally I think they should add Arm to it, also, and if needed (I don't know how many primaries they want at a maximum) move IA64 to secondary)), they greatly reduce this burden. Post-Sarge, they will do official stable releases for those architectures, in much the same way they do now. The secondary architectures will be allowed their own release schedule as determined by their port maintainers. No more holding up the entire stable release because (for example) the m68k architecture is having an issue.
Personally, as a Debian user, I think this is a good thing. I also think it will help move Debian towards a more regular (and attainable) release schedule.
(Log in to post comments)
Misleading title. . . Posted Mar 15, 2005 0:25 UTC (Tue) by phython (subscriber, #3278) [Link] Actually ARM is one of the architectures causing some build problems. So moving ARM down from a top tier arch is probably a good thing. Also, ARM needs a full binary break after sarge is released to get TLS and new tools
Misleading title. . . Posted Mar 17, 2005 13:52 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] It's true that there will be massive ABI breakage for etch to default to soft floating point (as there are only about two ARM CPUs with hardware floating point ever made so having this as the inefficient default for everything is pretty dumb). And whilst we are breaking everything there are a few other changes that are deemed to be a good idea.
Also although ARM is very widely used and lot of people base their work on debian's stuff or otherwise find it a useful resource (it's a big part of our business for example), the fraction of direct downloads from debian ftp mirrors is tiny: much less than 1%. So putting it on scc.debian.org makes sense to me. If embedded Debian ever reaches critical mass and millions of people start downloading debian-arm for their routers, then things might change and we could get bumped back up to mainline port status.
|
|||||||||||||