Dropping i686 media for F24

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 8:03 PM, Paul W. Frields <stickster at gmail.com> 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.

I feel that there's still enough i686 around to make it worth
continuing to ship an i686 installer. It's a single means of people
being able to consume all the various bits of Fedora for those that
are interested where specific products are dropped. So for example
people could still run server if they so wish. While i686 has
certainly dropped off I still would think it's in double percentage
points of users and that's not a small amount IMO.

Peter