[Dev] Fwd: Deprecation of i686

[Andreas Grapentin]

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 11:55:49AM -0400, Megver83 wrote:
> Hi, as you may know, in November Arch drops i686 support, and I was
> thinking about doing the same. Is not that I'm against of maintaining
> it, because if that's what the community wishes, I have no problem
> about. As we know, there are plenty of distros that are still available
> for i686 (free ones and non-free ones), and as x64 PCs are much more
> than 32-bits ones (we could do a survey maybe?) I start to understand
> the reason of dropping the support for this architecture.
> 
> so, what do you think?

I am partial about this. On the one hand, I know a lot of people running
around with 32 bit laptops - 10 years old or more - just because they
still *work*. And I'd hate excluding these people from the project
without providing them a proper way out. Basically, we'd make working
hardware obsolete, which is not a good thing.
But I can also understand it's a tough cookie to build and maintain the
entire arch package tree independently for i686. I don't even know
whether we have the computing power necessary for this.

Maybe we can have a middle way - we could officially support parabola as
a binary distribution for armv7h/i686, but provide cookbooks for people
to create ports for their own architectures, and maybe collect community
patches for these architectures, that would take the burden of
maintenance from our shoulders.

what are the hyperbola guys doing about this? I assume since they are an
lts distribution, they will maintain i686 support?

-A


-- 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
my GPG Public Key:                 https://files.grapentin.org/.gpg/public.key
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/attachments/20170530/04a2b098/attachment.sig>