[Dev] Fwd: Deprecation of i686

[Megver83]

El 30/05/17 a las 12:33, Andreas Grapentin escribió:
> 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.

That's right, but this is why I say that there are many of other distros
which are still for i686, although it's true we would make working
hardware obsolete, but consider that we could use our efforts to give
ARM a better maintenance.

Note also that a lot of people run 32-bits OSes but they have 64-bits
PCs, I've a 10 years old laptop which can run 64-bits, but it already
died :(

> 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.

That's right, because although we have an autobuilder, IDK how powerful
are servers to do the same work of ALARM (in the sense of porting
packages to other architectures like crazy)

> 
> 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.

hummm, you gave me an idea, but it's a little complicated, what if we
make a fork of pacman which compiles i686 packages? We could still
support i686, even as binaries *but* only in the case of Parabola's
repositories, like [libre], [pcr], [kernels], [nonprism], etc. and
Arch's packages could be automatically compiled, like the ones in
[core], [extra], and [community] by a script or sth. (that's the idea of
forking pacman, the script should also modify the arch=() array).

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

Good question, I'm Cc'ing them

> 
> -A
> 
> 
> 
> 
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