Hello! On 12/9/18 3:18 PM, Matthias Klose wrote: > To me it looks sometimes that Debian is used for testing by upstream, and for > that the mips architectures don't need to be release architectures.
A note on this: If you decide to move MIPS to Debian Ports, you will make the port unusable to most users as Debian Ports has a rather rudimentary FTP archive setup which has some annoying side effects. There is no support for a testing release, there is no support for cruft and the FTP maintainers will eventually remove any MIPS-only packages from the Debian archive which don't build on other architectures which usually affects packages like boot loaders meaning that it will no longer be easily possible to build the debian-installer package and consequently build installation images. The 32-bit PowerPC port lost quite a number of users because of this change. Not because the port was not healthy but because people want to be able to install a stable release. Debian unfortunately doesn't have really good support for Tier II architectures, it's either release or something based on unstable that requires extra elbow grease from both users and maintainers. Please also keep in mind that removing MIPS from the list of release architectures would mean one less open platform on which Debian is supported. Neither anything based on ARM, x86 or IBM Z provides a true open platform due to the proprietary nature of these architectures. There are some efforts in this regard on IBM POWER, but the hardware is still rather expensive, unfortunately. I do hope that RISC-V will catch up in the future though. I also think that the broad architecture support is one of the selling points of Debian and if we were to limit Debian's architecture support to just ARM, x86, POWER and IBM Z, I fear that Debian would more and more be turned into a mere development project for Ubuntu and other derivatives rather than being an operating system of its own. Thanks, Adrian -- .''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz : :' : Debian Developer - glaub...@debian.org `. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaub...@physik.fu-berlin.de `- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
