Hi Hector, On Tue, 2024-08-06 at 13:03 +0200, Hector Oron wrote: > > It's certainly not easy to determine the actual usage statistics, but as > > long as there > > is a considerable user base, I think dropping support for hardware because > > it's old > > doesn't sound right to me. > > The main reasoning for dropping the port are the problems listed at: > - https://release.debian.org/testing/arch_qualify.html
OK, so the main issue here seems to be the aging hardware of the buildds. >From what I remember from my discussions with Alex Graf (former colleague at SUSE), there are some ARM64 systems which support 32-bit ARM binaries without limitations. Has that changed in the mean time? > On the other hand, I find your arguments and Arnd's one about keeping > an official release with time64 library support very useful to keep > port alive one more release. Yeah, it would be strange if we dropped armel now after we've gone through all the efforts to switch the port to time64_t ;-). > Note that dropping from stable does not mean we fully drop the port, > it can be kept as non-release architecture, then it would not block > security updates like the ones we had with linux kernel build > failures. Sure, I'm aware of that. The problem is just that the infrastructure we have at Debian Ports is quite inferior to what we have for release architectures (no support for cruft, no Britney, no Ben etc), so moving an architecture to Ports doesn't just mean you lose support for a stable release but also quite a lot of stuff that is makes maintaining an architecture in Debian much easier. I have been a proponent of a Tier system within Debian similar to what NetBSD has: > https://www.netbsd.org/ports/#tiers But so far there has been little to no feedback to this idea. If we introduced tiers, we could easily downgrade architectures like armel to a less well supported tier without all the disadvantages that moving it to Debian Ports has. > And for old devices (which I also still have) you can always find > unsupported releases at archive.debian.org, maybe we could have an > unofficial kernel package for those devices. Sure, that was never the question. Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
