Leo Famulari <l...@famulari.name> writes: > People have presented some good reasons for keeping at least some level > of i686 support. > > But unfortunately, 3rd party channels cannot be one of them, whether or > not they follow the FSDG. > > Of course, we won't deliberately make their work more difficult, and > maybe we consider their needs if it's easy, but I think they shouldn't > be considered to present compelling arguments for us to make decisions > within GNU Guix, especially if it involves us doing extra work.
That's true enough! I don't mean to say that 3rd party channels using i686 is sufficient reason alone to support it. I just consider it worth keeping in mind. In my opinion, when we ask questions like "Does anyone use X", it doesn't really matter if that answer is "Yes, in my custom config" vs. "Yes, in this 3rd party channel my custom config uses". The primary distinction between the two is if the code is shared publicly. I don't see that line in the sand being helpful when asking about usage. To phrase this another way, if I instead said "I use multiarch environments containing i686-linux Guix packages to run software that can't be ported to x64" without mentioning 3rd-party channels at all, would that suddenly become valid usage? Why? i686 multiarch environments are useful in certain cases. Regardless of whether those environments are provided in Guix proper, in a custom config, or a 3rd party channel, user-facing functionality will be lost if we remove them. Breaking changes are okay, and if we consider this too niche of a use case or too high of a maintenance burden it should be dropped. I do believe it should progress into the consideration stage instead of being discarded outright. Thanks! :) -- Take it easy, Richard Sent Making my computer weirder one commit at a time.
