On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 11:16:41AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > I think a possible solution is the plan we had inside Debian Ports which is > to introduce a Britney instance within Debian Ports and hence be able to > provide a Debian testing release. > > My dream would be to not to have the distinction between release architectures > and ports architectures, but rather something like Tier I and Tier II > architectures with the Tier II architectures sharing the characteristics of > the Tier I architectures but without any support and without the buildds > and porterboxes being maintained by DSA.
It would be great -- I tried to make an unofficial Jessie release for x32, but doing the equivalent of Britney turned out to be too hard. The main reason was binNMUs: any out-of-archive binNMU conflicts with official binNMUs that come later, there's no record of in-archive binNMUs that's reasonably accessible to an outside observer (at least a non-DD, I wasn't one at the time). The main reason I can't recommend x32 to any serious user, even for its primary role of running inside containers[1] -- no even unofficial security support makes it a non-starter. On the other hand, as only very few packages have ports-specific changes (ie, a +x32 version in unreleased), rudimentary security support would be mostly a matter of automated builds of whatever hits the security repo. Embargoed information is not supposed to reach non-DSA machines but a slight delay wouldn't be unacceptable. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: no testing release means no good way to snapshot it as unofficial stable, no stable means no users, no users means no motivation to work on the port. Meow! [1]. I for one consider using x32 with a GUI to be a waste of time: the gains are significantly smaller memory use but only modest speed gains. All modern x86 have so much memory that saving some is not worth extra human effort for just a single instance, thus reasons to use x32 are limited to running many containers on one machine (where memory savings scale) and possibly serious number crunching (where even a small speed gain matters). -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Laws we want back: Poland, Dz.U. 1921 nr.30 poz.177 (also Dz.U. ⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ 1920 nr.11 poz.61): Art.2: An official, guilty of accepting a gift ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ or another material benefit, or a promise thereof, [in matters ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ relevant to duties], shall be punished by death by shooting.
