On Fri, 12 May 2023 at 12:42, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote: > > 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. >
Are you aware of any actual users? > 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]. > Fair enough > 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. > I already sent a similar patch to the linux-ia64 a while ago, and the only person that objected was you :-) > > 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. > That is reasonable - let's see how other people feel about this. -- Ard. _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
