On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 10:24 AM, Hans de Goede <hdegoede(a)redhat.com> wrote:
Hi,
On 12-07-17 14:40, Matthew Miller wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 01:43:53PM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>> If cost is an issue, consider to drop all these ppc, arm, s370 and
>> mips targets.
>>
>> Their user base is like magnitudes smaller than the i686 user base,
>> while these target are having a significant impact (and thus cost)
>> on everything in Fedora.
>
>
> Ralf, you know how this works: Fedora is made up of people, and
> therefore Fedora does what people show up to do. People are showing up
> to work on those other architectures, even though they are niche, and
> *no one* is showing up for i686.
That is not true. Let me quote my reply to Josh on this:
"""
>
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-February/208368.html
Which is yet another generic, non specific call for help. Which
unsurprisingly (given its unspecificness) did probably not get
a lot of response.
What would be helpful is a concrete list of things people who
care about i686 can work about. For example an i686 kernel tracker
bug + link to that on the
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Kernel
page.
I believe that something among the lines of: "we need help, but we
are not really specifying what, still please do something" is not
going to get you a lot of help.
OTOH "here is a prioritized list of TODO items, if all of the
high prio items have not been solved before $date, then we are
going to have to drop ia32 support from F28" OTOH will likely
be much more effective IMHO. This will cut 2 ways:
1) It will likely get the kernel team more help
2) If the kernel team does not get help, or not enough, then
you have a strong argument that not enough people care about
ia32 bit support and it should be dropped
"""
I believe there are 2 problems here:
1) i686 support is limping on in a state where it more or less
still just works, so there are no itches to scratch and thus no
volunteers
That seems accurate, except for the bugs that the kernel team did fix
along the way for whatever reason.
2) There have been some requests of help, but they have IMHO
not been specific enough. A request for help should really be
seen as sort of a bug report and just like "the program does
not work" or "the program is broken" are not useful bug reports
"we need help" is not a useful request for help.
This is not accurate. As I said in my other reply, the kernel team
isn't asking for help with i686. It simply isn't a priority at all.
Also, in the context of overall i686 HW support, it is worth pointing
out that none of the Editions has a 32-bit release blocking artifact.
Most of them don't care about 32-bit installs either, with some of
them not even having them produced.
josh