Dropping i686 media for F24

[Peter Robinson]

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 :)