Hi Steve, 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. 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. 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. 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. Helmut