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

[Jan Alexander Steffens]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 9:51 PM Bartłomiej Piotrowski <
bpiotrowski at archlinux.org> wrote:

> 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
>

A bit +1 from me for dropping i686 sooner rather than later. The less I
have to care about it the better.