Hi John,

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 2:02 AM John M. Harris, Jr.
<joh...@splentity.com> wrote:
>
> The thing is, i686 still works. The kernel still builds as well, without 
> issue. I have no idea what the issues that have been mentioned are, and I've 
> kept asking. Nobody has given me an answer. Nobody has pointed me to an 
> issue, or I'd be working on that in my free time.

Here you go:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1489998
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=179258

Though from my own experience, I'm pretty sure that there are plenty
more x86_32 issues that have gone unreported.

While I did not have what I thought would be the required amount of
time to commit to the x86 SIG to be a "full member", I am one of the
handful of people that advocated keeping i686 in Fedora and until last
February I actively tried to at least reproduce the issues reported
and help with debugging. Even back then, it was apparent that we could
only try to maintain a subset of packages in Fedora, since many
upstream developers just could not test their software on i686, or
32-bit hardware lacked capabilities that were common among 64-bit
CPUs, e.g. SSE2. Some developers were adamant that they no longer
cared about 32-bit. The kernel team was already spread thin and they
made it pretty clear that should we decide to keep the x86_32 arch, it
would be up to us to resolve any bugs that came up.

The reality of the matter was that only 2 or 3 people had the skills
to actually provide fixes after a problem was identified and
reproduced. Quite often, bugs were found that were hardware-dependent
and not everyone had access to said buggy hardware. On the x86 mailing
list's page it says:
"We are looking for active participants who can help test and debug
Fedora on x86_32 hardware. From this testing, the project will be
better able to access which 32 bit hardware is still supportable."
Nobody else stepped up in the meantime and some of the comments flying
back and forth these last days are very unfair to the people who
actually did the work to keep the arch working.
As for me, I moved to another country almost two years ago and had to
leave all of my beloved relics behind. I could only take an Atom
netbook with me and debugging stuff on that was no fun - when I could
actually reproduce a bug. Eventually I ran out of time to spare.

Like others suggested, you, Victor V. Shkamerda and others who have
complained about the state of things, you do have options. Just be
realistic about the amount of work required.


> LibreOffice and Firefox both build for i686 without issue. Further, I don't 
> know software that requires more than 4 GiB of memory to compile.

On my Gentoo workstation I had switched to the LibreOffice (or was it
OpenOffice?) binary around 2011 and to the firefox binary in 2014.
Even back then, I had to increase swap size to accommodate the
compilation needs of packages that were usually dependencies of
packages I cared about.

Best regards,
A.
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