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(a)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.