[vox] News from Vancouver: Debian to cut to 4 major arches for Etch (and Sarge news...)

[Karsten M. Self]

This is buzz right now on #debian IRC channels.

As of etch (next release after sarge), Debian will split itself to
"major" and "SCC" (second-class citizen) arches.  Major arches are i386,
powerpc, ia64, and amd64.

    http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/03/msg00012.html

    To: debian-devel-announce at lists.debian.org
    Subject: Bits (Nybbles?) from the Vancouver release team meeting
    From: Steve Langasek <vorlon at debian.org>
    Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:45:09 -0800

    The release team and the ftpmasters are mutually agreed that it is
    not sustainable to continue making coordinated releases for as many
    architectures as sarge currently contains, let alone for as many new
    proposed architectures as are waiting in the wings.  The reality is
    that keeping eleven architectures in a releasable state has been a
    major source of work for the release team, the d-i team, and the
    kernel team over the past year; not to mention the time spent by the
    DSA/buildd admins and the security team.  It's also not clear how
    much benefit there is from doing stable releases for all of these
    architectures, because they aren't necessarily useful to the
    communities surrounding those ports.

    <...>

    We project that applying these rules for etch will reduce the set of
    candidate architectures from 11 to approximately 4 (i386, powerpc,
    ia64 and amd64 -- which will be added after sarge's release when
    mirror space is freed up by moving the other architectures to
    scc.debian.org).  This will drastically reduce the architecture
    coordination required in testing, giving us a more limber release
    process and (it is hoped) a much shorter release cycle on the order
    of 12-18 months.

    Architectures that are no longer being considered for stable
    releases are not going to be left out in the cold.  The SCC
    infrastructure is intended as a long-term option for these other
    architectures, and the ftpmasters also intend to provide porter
    teams with the option of releasing periodic (or not-so-periodic)
    per-architecture snapshots of unstable.


Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <kmself at ix.netcom.com>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    After all, if you can't trust a Romanian tabloid, then who can you trust?
    - The Register
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