The future of i486 arch in Th

[Jan Rękorajski]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2014, Witold Filipczyk wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 09:01:58PM +0100, Jan Rękorajski wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Kernel build for non-PAE i686 is what I want.

Will be there today on i686, but only for head, so no vserver.

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