Retiring the sparc32 port

Posted by Sander_Marechal on Jul 18, 2007 4:10 PM EDT
Debian mailing list; By Jurij Smakov
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For the last couple of years the sparc32 port did not have an active upstream maintainer, so the task of kernel maintenance has been shifted on to the developers and contributors, working on Debian's sparc port. It was suggested that support for it should be dropped in the next Debian's release. While there were a few objections, nobody stepped up to the plate and volunteered to become a new sparc32 maintainer. Thus, the only option we have at this point is to officially declare that lenny will not include support for sparc32 hardware.

Greetings,

For the last couple of years the sparc32 port did not have an active upstream maintainer, so the task of kernel maintenance has been shifted on to the developers and contributors, working on Debian's sparc port. Lack of upstream support made it something of a challenge to bring it to release quality for etch. Even though we deemed it suitable for release, there were quite a few problems, which a well-maintained port should not have. As there was little to none continued interest in supporting sparc32 in Debian, a discussion was started on the debian-sparc mailing list about the future of sparc32 for lenny. In particular, it was suggested that support for it should be dropped in the next Debian's release [0].

While there were a few objections, nobody stepped up to the plate and volunteered to become a new sparc32 maintainer. Thus, the only option we have at this point is to officially declare that lenny will not include support for sparc32 hardware (this decision has been coordinated with the release, installer and kernel teams). Newer sparc64 hardware will be supported as before, and we hope that we will be able to improve the performance by optimizing compilation of packages for Ultrasparc CPUs.

[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2007/04/msg00044.html

Best regards,

-- Jurij Smakov

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