On Wed, 2016-09-28 at 21:12 +0200, Bartłomiej Piotrowski wrote:
On 2016-09-28 05:10, Allan McRae wrote:
The most pressing issue is #1. So lets get back to the issue of the increasing amount of software requiring SSE2. How do we solve this?
I thought about it, and I lean toward dropping i686 completely. The only thing that SSE2 requirement will do is even further decrease of i686 users.
Because we will deprecate i686 eventually, I don't think we should beat around the bush. There is no benefit of switching to i786 in terms of time spent for building packages. Even our completely old pkgstats data say that 8.53% use 32 bit Arch, while only 4.21% of submissions came from systems with amd64-incompatible CPU. It's just not worth the hassle.
Bartłomiej
Marking it as deprecated everywhere with a timeline to officially dropping it as a first tier architecture would be nice. Can give people enough time to work out a way of doing automated builds, even official ones if there are developers / trusted users interested in doing it. It isn't going to get automated away without making it clear that it will be dropped at a certain date whether or not that's implemented. Very few of us are actually testing on i686 anymore. It might as well all be automated by the people still interested in it.