Hi, I have no i686 around here anymore since more than a year. If there is no real need for it anymore we should stop supporting it. greetings tpowa 2016-12-13 1:51 GMT+01:00 Gaetan Bisson <bisson@archlinux.org>:
[2016-12-12 21:51:31 +0100] Bartłomiej Piotrowski:
In September we discussed upgrading the default -march value for packages to include SSE2 (and possibly more instructions). I think the general consensus was that we don't agree what we should do and we just left the problem intact.
Semi-necrobumping that thread, I want to bring back one proposal – let's deprecate i686 architecture. All my machines at home and work are x86_64. Building i686 packages is a chore I'm less and less willing to do, and I boot up a 32-bit virtual machine only if bug has been reported against that architecture. No, I don't do even smoke tests – I assume that i686 works if x86_64 does. (Don't beat me up too hard for that.)
To back up my idea, our completely unreliable pkgstats data says that 8.53% came from i686 installs, but only a little over 4% is incompatible with amd64. Obviously there is no way to verify this data, but I suspect that these numbers are even lower in the reality. We're just wasting our time.
I'd like to set a certain date of dropping i686 completely. During that time, community and/or interested packagers could come up with either automated build solution, making it "tier 2" architecture. Otherwise it would just die of natural cause.
That sounds great to me.
How about June 1st, 2017? It's about six months for now, surely that's enough time to see things coming for those who still care about i686.
Cheers.
-- Gaetan
-- Tobias Powalowski Archlinux Developer & Package Maintainer (tpowa) http://www.archlinux.org tpowa@archlinux.org