It has now been a week since DragonFly 3.4 has been released. Given many people are feeling it's time to end support for i386 machines, I have decided to create some statistics on the relative usage of the 32 and 64-bit architectures.
The following raw numbers represent the number of DragonFly 3.4 package downloads on mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org : * 3436 pkgng/dports x86:32 downloads * 14223 pkgng/dports x86:64 downloads * 120 pkgsrc i386 downloads * 139 pkgsrc x86_64 downloads In percentages, this means: * 80.15% of downloaded packages are for the amd64/x86_64 architecture * 98.55% of downloaded packages are pkgng/dports versions The ~= 80% 64-bit usage is mostly in line with what some Linux distributions are reporting. With almost 20% users, it's a hard-sell to remove support for 32-bit machines at this time. Now, the _very_ interesting (and unexpected) part is the less than 2% pkgsrc packages usage. Maybe it's just that pkgng is so much better, maybe it's that pkgsrc users prefer to build software from source. Difficult to know. In any case, I don't see a reason to continue building pkgsrc packages with these numbers. -- Francois Tigeot
