On 2022-10-07, Efraim Flashner wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 06, 2022 at 04:50:22PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> Firstly, I'd like to mention that we, in general, have a minimum system
> requirement of 2GB of RAM, and IIRC there aren't a lot of armhf boards
> out there which have that much. We do have a difference between building
> natively and cross building / building with '--target'.
>
> I'd like to comment on armhf for a moment. My memory is a but rusty, but
> I'm pretty sure that in December of 2021 mesa was bumped from 21.2.x to
> 21.3.x, and at that time it stopped building on/for armhf. I noticed in
> May of 2022 (5 months later) and got the build working again. That we
> went 5 months without anyone saying anything in bug reports that mesa
> wasn't building shows that either everyone who is using it is using
> software that doesn't use mesa, or we really don't have any armhf-linux
> users. I'm not advocating dropping the architecture, but it does feel
> like we're already at a best-effort level with it. As far as the pieces
> needed for bootstrapping aarch64 software (go and probably others),
> those get built anyway as needed by aarch64, so there's no worry about
> losing support for those software bits.

FWIW, on Debian guix 1.3.0 is currently at risk due to armhf and
i386/i686-linux missings builds due to test suite failures. It has been
hard to keep up with Guix in Debian, especially supporting "obscure"
platforms...

Though I'm guessing there may be reluctance to drop support for
i686-linux... I much more frequently encounter test suite failures when
building it, at least on Debian. It is surely less well supported than
x86_64-linux.

But dropping armhf and i386 at the moment looks ... helpful from a
Debian packaging perspective... :/

I'll try to package a git snapshot of guix and see if that fares any
better and hopefully find and fix issues before the next guix release!

live well,
  vagrant