Re: i686 core-updates failure.

[Andreas Enge]

Am Thu, Apr 13, 2023 at 01:23:15PM +0000 schrieb jgart:
> My thoughts on this are that unless someone has the time to maintain those 
> broken packages we should just remove them and clean up shop a bit.
> Is there a reason to keep around the broken packages?

Well, we can certainly remove a few hopeless, outdated, non-maintained
broken packages. But if we start to remove packages such as wget, and
Java, and Haskell, and much of R, and big chunks of Python, for i686,
this amounts to removing the architecture altogether. It is a decision
we may want to take at some point in time, but we should not do so casually.
And definitely not in this core-updates merge.

One argument for keeping i686 was that problems there were often indicative
of problems in "more exotic" architectures, whereas i686 is relatively easy
to build on x86_64 without specific (often slow) hardware. I am not sure
if this still holds for the 32 bit problems we have seen recently; so there
is a certain argument to make for removing the 32 bit architectures i686
and armhf (x86_64 will soon celebrate its 25th birthday, aarch64 is half
as old; I do not expect much hardware for the corresponding 32 bit
architectures to be around any more).

Andreas