Re: i686 core-updates failure.

[Csepp <raingloom@riseup.net>]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> writes:

> Am Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 01:23:15PM +0000 schrieb jgart:
>> My thoughts on this are that unless someone has the time to maintain
>> those broken packages we should just remove them and clean up shop a
>> bit.
>> Is there a reason to keep around the broken packages?
>
> Well, we can certainly remove a few hopeless, outdated, non-maintained
> broken packages. But if we start to remove packages such as wget, and
> Java, and Haskell, and much of R, and big chunks of Python, for i686,
> this amounts to removing the architecture altogether. It is a decision
> we may want to take at some point in time, but we should not do so casually.
> And definitely not in this core-updates merge.
>
> One argument for keeping i686 was that problems there were often indicative
> of problems in "more exotic" architectures, whereas i686 is relatively easy
> to build on x86_64 without specific (often slow) hardware. I am not sure
> if this still holds for the 32 bit problems we have seen recently; so there
> is a certain argument to make for removing the 32 bit architectures i686
> and armhf (x86_64 will soon celebrate its 25th birthday, aarch64 is half
> as old; I do not expect much hardware for the corresponding 32 bit
> architectures to be around any more).
>
> Andreas

That is a pretty terrible direction to take.  There are still plenty of
people who rely on old hardware who can't afford to buy new machines.
When discussing these issues, it is important to keep in mind that the
people who have enough spare time to contribute to this project and hang
out on the mailing lists come from a rather privileged background.  What
you think is reasonable to categorize as obsolete might be the only
machine a poor family could afford on the second hand market.
If Linux distros keep dropping support for old hardware, then they are
not liberatory, no matter how "free" their licenses are.

We are also in the middle of a massive climate crisis, so we should aim
to prolong the usefulness of existing hardware and not give in to this
planned obsolescence BS.