On September 18, 2019 10:24:31 AM UTC, "Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek" <zbyszek@in.waw.pl> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 11:56:49AM +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
John M. Harris, Jr. wrote:
These are generic servers. I can provide a link to the vendor's website
when I get home. It is not Dell, Lenovo or similar, those are currently
selling mostly x86_64. Additionally, many users don't want to buy a new
computer just because a software project made the decision to randomly
drop support for their architecture. I am certainly one of those. The
hardware is fine, perfect working condition. I don't understand why we
should simply turn these to e-waste because somebody flipped the
proverbial switch.

Hi Kevin,

you are not being fair in this assessment. Going point by point:

* dropping, in short succession, of the i686 kernel, the i686 images, and
  then even the i686 repositories even though there are legitimate use cases
  for them on an x86_64 kernel (e.g., building multilib packages),

So... building multilib packages is still very much supported. You cannot
*run* a pure-i686 environment, but you can 32 bit development.

* the insane proposal to require AVX2 for x86_64, which has thankfully not
  been implemented so far, but against which we will likely have to fight
  again and again during the next few years,

This proposal was rejected very forcefully. fedora-devel was unanimous
with >100 messages, which I have never seen apart from that once case.
If it get's proposed again, you can expect the same result.

* the reenforcement of the mass-retirement procedures and the resulting
  aggressive mass-retirement of hundreds of FTBFS or orphaned packages, with
  no regards to why (or even if, in the latter case) they fail to build,
  whether they still work, how essential they are, nor what or how many
  other packages (including essential ones) depend on them,

Well, yes. Unmaintained packages are retired. Sorry, but it's either that
or development of new things in Fedora stops, because every change is hamstrung
by uninstallable and unbuildable packages. We just can't have packages with
no maintainers.

Those removals are not quick: FTBFS packages are retired after *months*,
orphaning usually only happens when there are long-standing unresolved bugs.
In most cases, the package is bitrotting for multiple releases before any
removal happens.

* the unprecedentedly aggressive removal of Python 2 and anything remotely
  related to it, where useful packages can arbitrarily be vetoed by
  committee (see e.g. https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2223 ).

That's very much unfair. The python team has put an _insane_ amount of
work into telling everyone about the transition, planning all the
steps, filing bugs, retiring leaf packages first, asking for feedback,
fixing bugs, etc, etc, etc. "Agressive" would be all python2 packages
were simply dropped after F32 branching.

So sorry, but you can't expect every obsolete hardware technology and
software stack from previous decade gets to hold everyone else hostage.

Zbyszek
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