Hi Helmut, On Tue, Jun 06, 2023 at 09:33:22AM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote: > On Tue, May 16, 2023 at 09:04:10PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > > * … but NOT on i386. Because i386 as an architecture is primarily of > > interest for running legacy binaries which cannot be rebuilt against a new > > ABI, changing the ABI on i386 would be counterproductive, as mentioned in > > https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time.
> I've been reading the discussion around i386 a bit and found the > direction it has taken a little unproductive. I hope we can agree that > there is no consensus on keeping or changing the time ABI for i386 while > there is quite some consensus for your plan on changing the time ABI for > all other 32bit architectures in roughly the way you brought forward. I have a different read on the consensus here. While there has been a lot of discussion about whether to continue supporting i386 as a host arch, almost everyone participating in the thread who said they want this is not a voting member of Debian. The lone exception that I can recall from the thread was Guillem, who, as dpkg maintainer, is certainly a stakeholder in this decision (and since we don't really have an "i386 porting team", probably the most important individual stakeholder). Since my read is that Guillem was in the "rough" of "rough consensus", I asked him directly how we should move forward on a decision. A GR is one option, and I think it's definitely a better option than going through the TC: while there is a decision to be made here about a "technical" detail of what dpkg-buildflags will do, you're right to point out that it's really a decision about what we want to support as a project. > While the i386 discussion seemed a little unproductive at times, I think > there is one major argument that I feel is missing here. If keeping the > 32bit time ABI for i386, that effectively becomes a divergence from > every other architecture. i386 will be the one and only architecture to > be time32. As it happens, I have some experience with such divergence > from how bootstrapping interacted with other transitions such as PIE. > Maintaining this kind of divergence has a non-trivial cost. Over time it > becomes more and more difficult and less and less people are interested > in doing it. As such, I see the addition of this kind of divergence as a > way of killing i386. Hmm, I don't share this particular concern. PIE is a change to compiler behavior. 32-bit time_t is a change to defines that modify types (and prototypes) used in header files. Maintaining a compiler is hard, maintaining a library ABI is "easy" - glibc has avoided breaking ABI for 25 years so far. > Judging from the conversation, killing i386 quite obviously is desired > by some participants, but evidently not by all. How quickly we want to > kill it is not obvious to me. However, I think it is fair to say that > keeping time32 on i386 will kill it rather sooner than later. With > time32, we cannot reasonably extend i386 beyond forky as we'd be running > too close to the final deadline. As a reliable host OS, sure. As a compatibility layer, as Simon has pointed out, having a wrong idea of the time is not a big deal for a lot of applications. > Some of you may have been aware of that Debian Reunion in Hamburg > recently. There was a BoF on how Debian should decide about non-trivial > matters and one result of that BoF was "maybe we should GR more often". > I think the decision of what to do with time32 is not a really important > one despite some people being very opinionated about it. How about > settling it using a GR anyway? We perceive GRs as painful and there is a > saying that if something is difficult, let's do it more often. How about > trying to do GRs more often with this decision? I think it is pretty > clear that neither answer is wrong. It's a choice that we have make and > then to stick to. And we can learn something about whether GRs really > are painful. I think the worst of outcomes we could get here is going > into much further detail in a GR and adding lots of competing proposals > there. If that were to happen, I'd consider the experiment as failed. > Leaving the details to those who put up with the work (and that quite > obviously is Steve et al here) is important in my book. So unless we can > do it as simple as "i386 should keep being time32" vs "i386 should > become time64 by default", we probably shouldn't GR it. I am not keen to try to drive a GR on this, but if you raised one I'm likely to second it. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
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