On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 12:06:08PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > So, I'd just like to re-emphasise this, because I still haven't seen > anything that counts as useful. I'm thinking something like "We use s390 > to host 6231 scientific users on Debian in a manner compatible to the > workstations they use; the software we use is ....; we rely on having > security support from Debian because we need to be on the interweb 2; > ...". At the moment, the only use cases I'm confident exist are: > > m68k, mips, mipsel, hppa: I've got one in the basement, and I like > to brag that I run Debian on it; also I occassionally get some work out > of > it, but it'd be trivial to replace with i386.
Aren't the first three of these also actively being used in embedded applications? (not sure about that one; I'm not /that/ much involved with embedded stuff) I can also imagine some hppa boxes being used as test or development platform in the enterprise. Note that they were still being sold as new only a few years ago. > sparc, alpha: We've bought some of these a while ago, they're useful > running Debian, we'd really rather not have to stress with switching to > i386, but whatever. > > arm: We're developing some embedded boxes, that won't run Debian > proper, but it's really convenient to have Debian there to bootstrap > them trivially. Also note that having a supported port to a processor which is mainly being used in embedded situations is useful even to people who don't necessarily use Debian themselves, in that it ensures a level of quality in the kernel, the toolchain, and Free Software running on that platform. This is what I would call 'indirect use': people not directly using Debian, but still benefitting from Debian's efforts on supporting that architecture. Dropping such architectures would likely result in GNU/Linux losing popularity in the embedded area -- one of the areas where GNU/Linux has a great momentum currently. > s390: Hey, it's got spare cycles, why not? I honestly think it's more than that. s390 systems are way too expensive for the average hobbyist; only large corporations can afford its price and power consumption. I would be genuinely surprised if there weren't one of those enterprises running their website off a Debian VM running apache, or so. > None of those are enough to justify effort maintaining a separate > testing-esque suite for them; but surely someone has some better > examples they can post... Testing is never interesting for people in many of the above scenarios, but that doesn't mean we have to drop it. Debian stable usually /is/ interesting for people in the above scenarios; but the only way Debian stable can currently reach the quality it is known for, is by using testing. Unless you have a different view. And no, unstable snapshots isn't a workable alternative, IMO. > The questions that need to be answered by the use case are "what useful > things are being done with the arch" and "why not just replace this with > i386/amd64 hardware when support for sarge is dropped, which won't be > for at least 12-18 months (minimum planned etch release cycle) plus 12 > months (expected support for sarge as oldstable)". Knowing why you're > using Debian and not another distribution or OS would be interesting too. <http://www.debian.org/users/> lists many of them. -- EARTH smog | bricks AIR -- mud -- FIRE soda water | tequila WATER -- with thanks to fortune
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