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

[Tobias Powalowski]

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 at 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 at archlinux.org