On 07/19/2014 09:32 AM, Cristian Rodríguez wrote:
We should drop the i586 port.. stop producing it before it becomes a pain as it surely will.. why ? there will be no more 32 bit x86 enterprise distributions, effectively removing the profit incentive to maintain this stuff in working order.
There sure are a lot of i586 boxes in the world and probably will be for another decade. It would be awful sad for a distro to say, "Sorry, but I don't see the profit in it for us..." Especially a established distro that has always catered to both. Seems like Linus should be turning over in his bed (not dead yet) That being said, suse can probably do i586 smarter. As long as the kernels remain backwards compatible (which they should for the reasonable lifetime of 32-bit) focus should be on some type of build layer/build system that can retain the needed 32 bit functionality without having i586 remain an equal partner with x86_64 in release development as far as driving 1/2 the development effort. At that point, i586 releases could tag along and contain all packages that continue to build on the platform, but not allow i586 to block or delay planned releases if x86_64 is ready by the target date. Just about all CPUs out there that are P4 equivalent or better, are still solid boxes for everything desktop/server related, except maybe for large builds (but just from a compile-time standpoint), etc. I still have a number running as fax-servers, file-servers and backup machines. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org