Dirk Eddelbuettel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Brian Nelson <pyro <at> debian.org> writes: >> And for the more obscure architectures, virtually all of the testing >> comes from the build of the package. How many people out there are >> actually using e.g. KDE on mips enough to actually find any portability >> bugs? > > That is an important point, and nobody else really picked it up. Almost all > other contributors to this thread engaged in attempts to stifle the debate > and claim "that the parrot wasn't dead, but resting". > > But to the best of my knowledge, Marco's (blog) post from a few months > ago which showed download from ftp.it.debian.org by architecture stands > undisputed: essentially all users are on i386 clearly dominating all other > arches, with a fraction of users in maybe two, three, four other arches --- > and comparitively nobody in the other fringe arches we keep around for no > good reason.
As long as the fringe architectures are not slowing down releases, and the mirrors have the bandwidth and disk space for them, I don't have a problem keeping them around. I have yet to see anyone give a compelling reason to keep them, but if they aren't hurting anyone, who cares? However, I do think that not including amd64 (while keeping mips and friends) in the sarge release due to mirroring problems is ridiculous. > And I still believe it delays our releases. As you say, there are no > KDE users on mips. So guys, we need a new framework. It's not clear to me how much supporting all of these arches delays our releases. I believe that some delay is inherent, but I'm skeptical whether it's significant compared to other sources of delay. I don't recall ever hearing a RM state that supporting all of these arches was slowing down the release cycle. And I think that's significant. The real problem seems to me, aside from the mysterious difficulties of setting up testing-security and t-p-u, seems to be that it's very hard to consistently keep the flow of packages into testing. There are too many inter-dependencies, packages are uploaded too frequently, and bugs appear at too great of a rate. Or at least that's my impression as an outside observer. Portability and buildd problems undoubtedly play a role in there, but I suspect it's a relatively minor role. Can someone more involved in the release process confirm or deny this? -- Society is never going to make any progress until we all learn to pretend to like each other. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
