[Dev] Future of i686

[Isaac David]

Le jeu. 26 janv. 2017 à 2:50, André Silva <emulatorman at riseup.net> a 
écrit :
> On 01/25/2017 11:13 PM, Luke Shumaker wrote:
>>  Arch just announced that they are phasing out i686 support, and 
>> expect
>>  to have it totally dropped in November.
>> 
>>  https://www.archlinux.org/news/phasing-out-i686-support/
>> 
>>  Do we want to keep i686 alive past that in Parabola?
>> 
>>  On one hand, i686 is increasingly obscure.  On the other hand, I'd
>>  hate to have to stop using my X60 tablet.
>> 
> 
> It's a problem for me since my server is a i686 machine too :S

I echo your sentiments.

somebody on irc correctly pointed out that some of the i945
thinkpads were sold with core 2 duo, as opposed to core duo,
cpus. those are 64-bit, and it should be possible to buy a used
chipset and upgrade for cheap. that said, I wouldn't like to
turn the back on the wealth of Libreboot-capable i686 machines
out there. i686 is kinda mainstream in our circles.

> 
>>  With recent discussions of recompiling packages from Arch, and not
>>  using their binaries, perhaps keeping i686 alive will be less effort
>>  in November than it might be today.
>> 
> 
> +1 With recent discussions about security issues from Arch [0], i 
> think
> is the time to begin build our distro from scratch with autobuilder
> or/and a build server (Arch ARM does it to maintain their packages).
> Could we use winston for it? How's the builder server going [1]?
> 
> [0]:https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2017-January/004678.html
> [1]:https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2016-November/004594.html

judging from [here] it looks as though some Arch devs really want
to see a community effort happen to keep i686 alive beyond
November:

[here]: 
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2017-January/thread.html#28666

I have joined the channels Arch has dedicated to the continuation
of an unofficial i686 port; they were given in the announcement.
irc is rather hollow, but some comments of regret already sparked
on the mailing list. No tangible plans so far, though. it would
also be nice to patrol the Arch forums.

the idea is that we could latch on to, or even join this port; and
that would keep Parabola i686 alive with minimal effort.

I find building all packages from scratch and automated builds
very attractive in the long run, for a number of reasons; not the
least of which is not running into broken applications after Arch
upgrades a library.

I think Winston is a bit overpowered for what it's trusted with
right now, but also underpowered so as to build *all* packages
with whatever is left from 4 GiB of ram.

regarding the build servers that were offered to us, I'm afraid
we might have let M.E.W. go away. On the other hand, I brought
the topic to Dezponia a couple times after that, and (s)he
expects to flesh the last details out soon after FOSDEM.
that machine is gonna be a freedom-loving monster; this is the way
to go. (s)he has had trouble sourcing the SSDs. maybe we could
destine some funds towards completing that server if necessary?

-- 
Isaac David
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Tox: 
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