Hi all, I have two linked proposals: 1) I propose we remove support for Gentoo on s390 and support only s390x instead; 2) We drop the s390 arch (covering both s390 and s390x) keywords to ~s390 (unstable).
Right now, we support both s390 and s390x with the same keyword (’s390’) but s390x has a subprofile. No separate keyword exists. In reality, this means all packages should be tested on s390 (lowest common denominator). This has some limitations: * upstreams aren’t particularly interested in the 31/32 bit platform that is the original s390; * Following on from That Cryptography Debacle, upstream Python and others may be looking to drop s390 support anyway; * s390 is not supported by e.g. libpcre for JIT. Ditto LaTeX which means we have to mask a lot of documentation. It’s not a huge deal but it shows how little attention folks pay to it, I’d like to make clear that this isn’t a knee-jerk response to recent events with the Python ecosystem; we have a limited amount of time and volunteers and I don’t recall seeing a bug report from an s390 user any time recently. Further, nobody other distros seem to be carrying s390 (only s390x). (On the recent dev-python/cryptography bug upstream, it was claimed s390 isn't supported by the kernel, but I can't find any evidence for this, so let's not base any decisions on that unless some evidence arises.) I tried to review old bugs and most were from Gentoo developers testing the platform, but I accept it may have had more relevance in the past. We’ve not even built stages for it in a year and nobody seems to have noticed. Motivation: * I'm the only person actively doing keywording and stabilisation for s390 and find it hard to keep up - reducing the workload would be helpful for me but also motivate me in terms of reporting issues when there's actually likelihood of it being fixed vs for a (thought to be) dead platform. * I’d prefer it if we only declared support for things we can support *well*. I’d say s390 isn’t currently in this category and at least having s390x as the target is a bit more realistic. * We’re not really consistent with what is/isn’t stable for s390 at present anyway, hence the profiles are dev/exp. * We’re going to have a headache with certain things like Rust and it’s an opportunity to assess what we’re supporting/not and ideally limiting our efforts to realistic & worthwhile targets. In any case, I’m not trying to kill off platforms people are using, so: 1) If anybody is using this, please tell us! 2) I’m quite happy (as well as others I’ve spoken with) to keep s390x which is more well-accepted as a platform and is still in circulation. Thanks, Sam
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