On Fri, 19 May 2023 at 22:58, Ansgar <ans...@43-1.org> wrote: > > On Fri, 2023-05-19 at 19:40 +0100, James Addison wrote: > > Do we know how often the i386 installer is downloaded compared to > > amd64, and could/should we start with updated messaging where those > > are provided before removing users' ability to install on their > > systems? > > > > (i386 remains the second-most-popular architecture behind amd64 today > > going by popcon[1] stats - perhaps a lot of that is people using i386 > > as a compatibility architecture only, but it'd be nice to be > > reasonably confident about that) > > One of the problems with popcon is that it draws too much attention to > old releases which isn't really interesting when talking about future > developments. If one looks at arch usage per release (as reported to > popcon) one gets this table: > > | Architecture | jessie | stretch | buster | bullseye | bookworm/sid | > |----------------+--------+---------+--------+----------+--------------| > | alpha | 1 | | | | 4 | > | amd64 | 9090 | 17156 | 41137 | 108145 | 14800 | > | arm64 | | 1 | 93 | 937 | 203 | > | armel | 21 | 47 | 67 | 68 | 10 | > | armhf | 7 | 18 | 216 | 429 | 49 | > | hppa | | | | | 8 | > | hurd-i386 | | | | 4 | 6 | > | i386 | 1318 | 1231 | 1495 | 3042 | 168 | > | ia64 | | | | | 3 | > | kfreebsd-amd64 | 2 | | | | | > | m68k | | 1 | | | 4 | > | mips | 2 | | 6 | | | > | mips64el | | | 6 | 4 | | > | mipsel | 2 | 1 | 7 | | | > | powerpc | 13 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 18 | > | ppc64 | | | | 1 | 28 | > | ppc64el | | 5 | 16 | | 12 | > | riscv64 | | | | | 15 | > | s390x | | | | 8 | 3 | > | sh4 | | | | | 1 | > | sparc64 | | | | | 11 | > | x32 | | | | | 2 | > |----------------+--------+---------+--------+----------+--------------| > | ∑ | 10456 | 18461 | 43044 | 112639 | 15345 | > #+TBLFM: @>$2..@>$>=vsum(@I..II) > > where i386 has dropped from 13% to 7% to 3% to 3% and finally to 1%. > Also interesting is that arm64 has taken over i386 on bookwork/sid. > > We don't know how many people downloaded i386 instead of amd64 as they > have an Intel CPU. > > What is also not clear is the bias of systems having popcon enabled at > all (it seems to be mostly desktop systems) and how it looks on the > total population.
Thanks, those are better statistics (and good notes about their limitations). I may be playing devil's advocate, but I do also read from those that the i386 install-base, even dwindled as it has to ~1%, remains more popular than many other architectures (within whatever dimension of users enable popcon) where we do provide install images, and then that those users tend to upgrade to the latest i386 release of Debian that they can -- and/or that despite the percentage-of-total trend reducing, the absolute population of those i386 users is growing (I guess the former is the larger contributing factor, but it's hard to determine from the numbers only). Meanwhile my understanding is that most of the i386 installer package -- although I referred to it as a binary package in another thread, using the source/binary package naming terminology -- is mostly shell scripting and architecture-independent logic. So I guess I will ask: is there a technical reason we want to drop d-i images on i386, or is it primarily about trying to reduce our anticipated support burden for one architecture? (and if people clamoured for an i386 installer to download, would we reverse the decision?)
