Dropping i686 media for F24

[Stephen Gallagher]

On Thu, 2015-08-20 at 12:35 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Stephen Gallagher <
> sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2015-08-19 at 15:03 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 08:43:44PM +0200, drago01 wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 8:36 PM, Christian Schaller <
> > > > cschalle at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > > Well there seems to be more laptops/desktops still in use on
> > > > > i686,
> > > > > and it is not a lot of engineering overhead. Is there a
> > > > > request
> > > > > from
> > > > > release engineering to be allowed to drop i686 media? (I
> > > > > would
> > > > > assume the
> > > > > gains are relatively small since we would need to keep i686
> > > > > packages around for
> > > > > some time regardless of having install media.)
> > > > 
> > > > Its the kernel team that said that i686 bugs are low priority
> > > > for
> > > > them.
> > > 
> > > That was definitely a big motivator, yes.  But in addition the
> > > statistics Matthew Miller showed at Flock clearly indicate the
> > > trend
> > > is against i686 for some time now.  In fact, there's a good
> > > argument
> > > to be made that we haven't added any significant number of those
> > > systems in some time (years), and it's a zombie population at
> > > this
> > > point (q.v. <http://jwboyer.livejournal.com/49909.html>).
> > > 
> > > The overall WG response I recall is to the effect of, "If an i686
> > > media/tree is not going to be well supported, we don't want it in
> > > the
> > > edition we ship."
> > > 
> > > I don't think it's extra rel-eng work to ship.  It's not clear
> > > whether
> > > it costs QA any time, but if it doesn't I guess I'd wonder where
> > > the
> > > actual testing is happening. :-) (This is not in any way a dig at
> > > QA.)
> > > So for me, if we can't say with certainty an i686 installation is
> > > an
> > > equivalent experience to x86_64, with the same support, we
> > > shouldn't
> > > ship it.
> > > 
> > 
> > QA does indeed have to test i686, so it would be a significant
> > reduction in effort for them at release validation time to drop
> > i686.
> 
> I'm sure QA is more than capable of speaking for themselves :)

I was speaking as someone who spends at least 8 hours every release
milestone doing exactly that. And I am not alone. So yeah, it's a
significant investment of time that we could reduce.
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