On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 9:51 PM Bartłomiej Piotrowski < [email protected]> 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.
