Hello Ard! On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 16:29 +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote: > > > Feel free to keep using it, but please stop demanding that our people > > > keep wasting their time on it. If you want to support it in Debian, > > > you can carry it as a downstream patch and shoulder the maintenance > > > burden. > > > > Who is "our people"? Do you think that you are part of the community and > > I am not? I don't think this kind of hostility is justified. Neither you > > nor I own this project. > > > > Apologies - I had meant to type 'other people' not 'our people'. I > rarely contribute to GRUB myself, so I wouldn't consider myself more a > part of this community than anyone else. > > But my point remains: I have inferred from your response (and your > involvement in similar discussions around the Linux kernel) that you > would prefer Itanium support to be retained, right?
Not necessarily. I am generally not opposed to removing ia64 support, but it should happen in a coordinated form where downstreams and users are involved. Just dropping support from random projects without prior coordination seems like the wrong approach to me. I would suggest posting your plans to the distributions mailing list [1], Debian's ia64 mailing list [2], the Gentoo developer mailing list [3], the Linux ia64 mailing list [4] and maybe the NetBSD ia64 mailing list [5]. If you don't get any objections there, I am not going to object either. I just want this to happen in an ordered manner. > So could you explain who you think should carry the maintenance > burden? IA64 will be the only EFI architecture in GRUB that does not > boot via an EFI stub in Linux, and this deviation means that retaining > support for it is going to take actual developer and maintainer > bandwidth. GRUB gets very little of that as it is, which means that > keeping IA64 support alive comes at the cost of worse support for > other architectures and platforms. (The series that this patch is part > of breaks the ia64 build, and i i struggle to see why i should care > about that) > > Very few of those people have access to such systems to begin with > (probably none), and the companies that manufactured them stopped > supporting them in the open source years ago, so testing these changes > is not straight-forward, making it unreasonable to demand this from > contributors. Also, it is unclear to me why the needs of the few > people that do still run such a system are not served by a build based > on today's GRUB tree, and why ia64 support needs to be retained going > forward. Well, that's why I am suggesting to coordinate this properly and ask potential users of the code whether they are okay with the removal. Thanks, Adrian > [1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions > [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/ > [3] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/ > [4] https://marc.info/?l=linux-ia64&r=1&w=1 > [5] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/tindex.html -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer `. `' Physicist `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913 _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel