[arch-dev-public] Shadowing i686, round 1

[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.

Let's see where we end up this time.

Bartłomiej

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