On 11 Sep 2019, at 16:12, vvs vvs <vvs009(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Even better. That means that you can still get support for x86 but it will require some
more work on the user's side. They should just check if that bug is indeed i686
specific.
I believe that all that argument for the lats three days was completely unnecessary and
should be blamed on an utterl failure of communication.
The fundamental thing here is that, when a package fails on S390 but not on x86-64, there
are motivated people in the S390 SIG who'll help me out with what's wrong,
explaining the differences between S390 and x86-64 in a useful format, and often just
fixing it if it's an S390-specific oddity, not a straight bug that happens not to
manifest on x86-64.
In contrast, the x86 SIG never got enough volunteers to do the same role - if a build was
an issue on x86 but not x86-64, then they'd not have the available manpower to help
the package maintainer (often the kernel maintainers, in x86's case) fix the build.
Had the x86 SIG been able to identify the root causes of bugs in packages that failed on
x86, like the kernel, and come up with usable workarounds and/or fixes, then Fedora would
not be considering dropping x86. As it is, though, it appears that nobody cares enough
about 32-bit kernels and binaries (although some x86-64 people care about 32-bit
libraries) to keep i686 builds going.
Fundamentally, this happens in volunteer projects - nobody wants to do the work, nobody is
willing to pay enough to get someone else to want to do the work, so it doesn't
happen.
--
Simon