Or: The Consequences of that awful Vancouver Proposal…
It’s no news that I’m no big fan of the Vancouver Proposal. It’s aiming into the wrong direction, IMHO, and is not very well thought through. It’s basically a master plan of dropping archs.
Anyway, the more m68k is diverting from the other archs after exclusion of testing migration, the more it becomes clear what consequences this has for an arch that is going to be dropped from Debian.
Roman Zippel (a m68k hacker) summarizes some consequences quite nicely in his post to debian-68k and debian-release.
As someone who has recently looked at and fixed many problems, I must say
the release team has done m68k no service by doing this and actually
sabotaged m68k in its ability to catch up again. …
Roman did really amazing work in tracking down and fixing the toolchain problems m68k had. Many kudos for that!
And it was some kind of obvious that the testing migration exclusion will hurt m68k more than it would help. And it will get worse and worse over time. And still the Vancouver proposal has no plan how to proceed in such a situation.
So the situation is now that m68k gets kicked out without no alternative
in place? Once the current building frenzy calms down, the situation
shouldn’t look too bad and if bugs for which fixes exists in the BTS where
actually fixed, m68k could be released with just a few packages less.
True. Instead of dropping a complete arch, it would’ve been better to just drop some package from that arch from the release. There’s a thread on -devel about this about that.
Not releasing m68k could have far worse consequences and should be
absolutely the last resort, e.g. it makes it difficult to upgrade between
stable releases, which might become a real issue, as m68k is likely to
need an ABI change for TLS support.
I doubt that anyone proposing the Vancouver plan was thinking about those kind of problems. Great job. Thank you!
As Wookey stated in the above mentioned thread on debian-devel, m68k just was the first arch and arm will follow most likely.
So, I propose to change Debians website from ”Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer.” to the more appropriate ”Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your i386/amd64 computers.”