Am Donnerstag, 14. Oktober 2021, 15:40:02 CEST schrieb Marek Szuba: > Dear everyone, > > Following some private discussions, I feel quite strongly now that it > would both considerably improve certain processes and make our use of > limited manpower more efficient were we to further reduce the number of > stable arches in Gentoo Linux. Specifically, I propose to drop > - hppa, > - sparc, > to ~arch-only status. > > There are IMHO several good reasons for this: > - we have got very few people actually supporting these arches, and in > case of hppa there is also the hardware bottleneck. Subsequently, > stabilisation requests often take a long time to resolve > - last but by no means least, my personal experience from the last > several years suggests that running ~arch is reasonably trouble-free > these days > > WDYT?
Reducing to what I have a personal opinion about. For quite a while I have been more or less the arch testing team for hppa and sparc, the latter reduced since ago and sam meanwhile utilize even faster machines to do much of the the sparc work (yay!). Running these machines is a bumpy ride. Things break quite regularly, besides the arch-independent breakage like missing dependencies or similar things, which I also find quite regularly. My machines should actually do some useful stuff, like running my Nagios and a bunch of nightly builds (CMake, libarchive, things like that). For that, I'd like to have the actual system to work. Given the amount of breakage I find when doing stabilizations I suspect this is not going to happen. My fear is that I'll be rebuilding stuff because there is an upgrade, and then back because there was an update, and in between I have to find out what actually went wrong. That's close to what I'm doing now, with the difference that the main system meanwhile can do it's work because it usually is unaffected, and I can decide to ignore the problem for one or another day until I'm bored enough to fight the breakage again. So from my limited PoV this would likely even increase the work that I have to do, or the pressure to do it in time to fix the system up to a point where it works. We have already removed many stable packages from hppa, just to reduce the amount of work. If sparc really becomes a problem I suspect that dropping most of the multimedia or whatever stuff there could also reduce the amount of work needed. Another note: these machines are quite slow, especially the hppa ones, when compared with a modern PC with SSD and tons of RAM. I would really _really_ welcome it if people could just run tatt for stabilizations on amd64 in a regularly empty chroot. It finds tons of stuff with missing dependencies or useflags (USE=static is always good for trouble) that I would otherwise run into on the slow machines. If you fix only half of the things before it hits the minor arches, which is not limited to the above list, it will greatly reduce the pain for everyone with a vintage fetish. So, do what I can't stop you from doing, but at least for me dropping hppa will likely not reduce any pain, and if sparc really is a problem than dropping some packages will likely do the same thing also. Oh, and maybe mark some for fonts and stuff ALLARCHES ;) Eike (aka Dakon)
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