On September 17, 2019 11:15:56 PM UTC, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 17 Sep 2019 at 17:28, John M. Harris, Jr. <johnmh@splentity.com> 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.


1. It wasn't randomly dropped. Many of us put in a lot of effort
trying to keep it from being dropped 2 years ago but also laid out
what would cause it to be dropped if things weren't met. Those things
were :
a. Interested people stepping up to fix problems versus waiting for
fixes from people who wanted to work on other things.
b. Key software being able to continue to compile on i686. if it
doesn't then interested people need to work out fixes/workarounds.
c. Regular meetings and other work that sigs do to keep people
interested and recruit new people when old people want to leave.

C was meant as a 'well if they have people who show up and
meet/talk/bring up things then it can make it clear it is important
enough others will likely help out.' It was probably the lowest thing
to meet and also the least likely to ding them if they didn't do it if
A and B were getting met. What happened was 1-2 people worked really
hard, burned out, and decided they had better things to do. No one
stepped in other than to complain that the 1-2 people didn't work on
something they wanted.

2. You don't have to e-waste the equipment. People who say that are
off-base and using blame/shame to get you to do something different.
On the other hand, most of the requests in the last month for i686
have also come across as trying to blame/shame other people to make
i686 work still. It may not be what people think they are saying, but
that is how it has come across.

The end point is that if Fedora no longer meets your needs, don't use
it... fork it and make Memdora for low memory systems. Find people
with the same problem and work with them even if it is switching to
Debian.

Also, what issues have you run into with x86 other than issues with the memory limit? Most of my systems do not have more than 4 GiB of memory to begin with. My laptop is, perhaps, the only exception among my personal hardware, and that's an X200T from 2009.

A lot of 'modern' applications to compile for i686 require more than 4
Gib to compile. While I can remember fondly that visicalc worked fine
in 32k, lots of modern stack/code assume a 64 bit bus and as things
from openoffice/mozilla/etc use those they no longer work in i686. At
a certain point what is being built on 32bit is not matching the rest
of Fedora and is a special case. As a special case it needs people who
are going to focus on it which the arm group has had but the i686
group did not. [Even then it might just be to block something or to
say that i686 is only going to aim at being for X service which means
that 'broken (aka I like bit bytes, I can not lie)' could just be
excluded. ] That takes having people with the problem to take the
time, organize and make decisions and compromises.