On 07/26/14 19:33, Michael Palimaka wrote: > On 07/27/2014 03:19 AM, William Hubbs wrote: >> If an arch team isn't going to honor a stable request, shouldn't they >> remove themselves from it and say so? >> >> Also, if an arch team does that, does that mean we don't have to file >> stable requests for that arch on future versions of the package? > > When armin did stabilisation for minor archs in the past, he took the > opportunity to evaluate whether it was still useful to have the package > stable. In many cases for small random packages, stable keywords were > dropped to reduce future workload. I always thought it was a pretty good > strategy. > >
Indeed! The thing was that a lot of the packages were keyworded and marked stable back in the day where the arch was more popular. But almost all arches except amd64/x86/arm are getting less and less popular: alpha: no new hardware in more than 8+ years hppa: being phased out IIRC, and no new workstations(ie, graphics/sound) in 5+ years ia64: no new workstations in 10 years, new servers are expensive ppc*: new workstations are expensive sparc: no new workstations in 7+ years, new servers expensive One of the reasons they are being killed, IMHO, its that the power consumption isn't worth, and an amd64 machine is pretty much more powerful, has more cores, and cheaper and has a lot less power consumption. My Sun Blade 1000 (workstation) uses 225W idling, my amd64 workstation uses 100W at full power or so. And the amd64 has way more cores and more performance. And let's not talk about the heat... Besides there's software like firefox and gnome3 that doesn't work in sparc due to unaligned accesses. Debian announced some months ago that they're dropping sparc support as well. Right now debian doesn't support, officially, alpha, hppa and sparc. Obviously ppc* has a lot of work because its the most keyworded arch behind amd64 and x86.
