On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 11:34:55PM +0100, Ingo Juergensmann wrote: > Although the problem is well known and the solution is obvious, nobody seems > to have the guts to make a change (or even to speak about it).
Let's have a discussion about reducing our number of architectures. Attempting to support several thousand binary packages on a dozen architectures across three release flavours imposes a large cost (see e.g. Joey Hess' recent blogging about the increased sysadmin work he has to do so that he can test d-installer). So we know the costs. Can we quantify the benefits? In http://blog.bofh.it/id_66, Marco showed these numbers of downloads at the Italian site: architecture files downloaded i386 1285422 all 504789 powerpc 17754 ia64 10111 sparc 3336 arm 850 alpha 507 hppa 204 mipsel 91 m68k 15 mips 7 s390 4 total 1823090 AFAIK this data has not been refuted. Clearly, for informed decision we'd need more data, from more hosts and over longer periods. But it would be nice if we based this discussion on /measurable usage/ of Debian to complement the costs with actual benefits -- as opposed to hypotheticals (such as compiling thousands of packages for arches without actual users). As it stands, 4 downloads for s390 appear somewhat disproportionate to 1,285,422 for i386. Dirk -- If you don't go with R now, you will someday. -- David Kane on r-sig-finance, 30 Nov 2004
