Validity of i686 as a release blocker

[Richard Z]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 09:47:27AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:

> In February[2] we sent out an email highlighting that the kernel team
> was not going to treat i686 bugs as a priority.  Since that time, we
> have held true to our word and have not focused on fixing i686 bugs at
> all.  It seems that the wider community is also treating i686
> similarly.  The kernel bug that was made automatic blocker because of
> existing criteria was present in Fedora since the 4.1-rc6 kernel,
> which was released May 31.  It has been in every boot.iso created
> since that date.  Not a single person reported this issue until last
> week.  That is a timespan of two months.
> 
> The kernel team has autotesting for i686 kernels, but the environment
> there does not utilize boot.iso so it did not detect this.  The QA
> team has automated testing for some of this, but nothing for the i686
> architecture at all.  It is not a priority there either.

I regularly use i686 and have not done a fresh install since years so
would not detect this. Maybe fresh installs aren't such a deal for i686
users and the apparent stability is the reason why it gets less testing.
The hardware is not changing so if fresh bugs appear there is a good 
chance that something else than just i686 is broken?

Appreciate all your efforts and would miss i686. Not a top priority
but maybe the memory footprint has some advantages on USB live images?

Richard

-- 
Name and OpenPGP keys available from pgp key servers