Dropping i686 media for F24

[Paul W. Frields]

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.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://redhat.com/   -  -  -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
    The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com