Guillem Jover wrote: >On Thu, 2023-05-18 at 12:01:40 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
... >> > > * ⦠but NOT on i386. Because i386 as an architecture is primarily of >> > > interest for running legacy binaries which cannot be rebuilt against a >> > > new >> > > ABI, changing the ABI on i386 would be counterproductive, as mentioned >> > > in >> > > https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time. >> >> > Like Russ, I'm also dubious about this, and introduces a special case >> > and complexity that does not seem warranted TBH. If this was the case it >> > would seem to me it would disallow SOVERSION bumps for example, which we >> > have never been concerned with. >> >> I didn't see anything in Russ's email in this thread that implied he was >> dubious of this approach? He simply has a library he maintains for which he >> believes binary compatibility is uninteresting. > >Ah, indeed, just reread the specific paragraph now, sorry Russ! :) > >> FWIW in Ubuntu where we maintain i386 strictly as an architecture for >> compatibility with third-party binaries, we have 1034 source packages that >> build Arch: i386 debs. Not all of those source packages are shared >> libraries, but enough of them are that manually updating them to maintain >> ABI compatibility on i386 would be a substantial amount of work. In terms >> of overall complexity, I think the scales tip in favor of the toolchain not >> defaulting to _TIME_BITS=64 on i386. > >The problem with obsolete packages is also shared by all other arches, >and for those and for local packages the dependency system works for >the user and should let them know whether they can upgrade or they >would need to remove such packages. For other local FOSS packages >they might just be able to rebuild them. > >Excluding i386 from this transition seems to me will pretty much >sentence it, and would also make it rather hard to perform that >transition cleanly going forward if people want to keep it alive. And >while Debian might eventually remove it from its official ports, we >have multiple old ports that are still maintained and used. > >If the main reason is to support non-free binaries, at least to me >that does not seem like a very compelling reason. And people can >always use old chroots or similar I guess? i386 is in a really awkward situation here, I think. Nobody is working on it explicitly any more (AFAICS?), but its history as by far the most common architecture means that: * we still have a (very!) long tail of installations using it * there are *massively* more old binaries available for it, free, proprietary *and* locally-built Moving forwards, we need to make a call on what we want i386 for. I was hoping to wait until after bookworm is released to have the meat of that discussion, but... I'm planning on stopping publishing installer images for i386 soon. Why? We should be strongly encouraging users to move away from it as a main architecture. If they're still installing i386 on 64-bit hardware, then that's a horrible mistake. If they're still running i386 *hardware*, then they should be replacing that hardware with more modern, more capable, more *efficient* stuff. As and when we switch i386 to a secondary status like this (however we label it!), then I think we should *only* consider it as a compatibility layer for older software. People *could* just use old chroots or similar, but the need is likely to be around for a while. There's a tension here: I think it's important to keep the old ABI around for those old binaries, and I genuinely don't see a use case for a new incompatible ABI on a mostly-dead architecture that won't support those binaries. *But* I think we'll also need to keep the port going with security fixes - it's still likely to be quite common and we need to keep users safe. People are even likely to want to keep old software running beyond 2038, in which case I envisage clock hacks coming to keep things limping on. :-/ -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com < sladen> I actually stayed in a hotel and arrived to find a post-it note stuck to the mini-bar saying "Paul: This fridge and fittings are the correct way around and do not need altering"
