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really developed upstream any more or got superseded by newer ones (for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
