The future of i486 arch in Th

[Jan Rękorajski]

TL;DR Future of i486 is bleak, it's a strong candidate for removal.

Proposal: remove i486 from Th.

Rationale:

It's increasingly more problematic to get everything built on i486, some
packages explicitly say "no" to this arch, some require hacks and
strange workarounds, and other just silently fail in mysterious ways.
All this makes maintainability cost of i486 very high, and combined
with the size of userbase, overly high.

Some usage stats from the Sun Nov 16 - Sun Dec 14 period, from
ftp1.pld-linux.org:

# zgrep x86_64 /var/log/archive/xferlog*gz  | grep -v <builder-ip> | grep poldek | awk '{ print $7 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | wc -l
533

# zgrep i686 /var/log/archive/xferlog*gz  | grep -v <builder-ip> | grep poldek | awk '{ print $7 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | wc -l
730

# zgrep i486 /var/log/archive/xferlog*gz  | grep -v <builder-ip> | grep poldek | awk '{ print $7 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | wc -l
20

# zgrep i486 /var/log/archive/xferlog*gz  | grep -v <builder-ip> | grep poldek | awk '{ print $7 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
[exact IPs removed to protect privacy]
      < 10		4 IPs
      < 50		4 IPs
      < 100		4 IPs
      < 1000		7 IPs
      > 1000		1 IP

As you can see there are 20 distinct users of i486, out of which
maybe 5 really use this arch.

Due to higher workload i486 arch requires compared to anything else and
symbolic userbase, I propose to drop it from Th.

Comments?

PS. we can use former i486 builder for x32 port if there will be takers.

-- 
Jan Rękorajski                    | PLD/Linux
SysAdm | baggins<at>pld-linux.org | http://www.pld-linux.org/