On Mon, 15 Jul 2019 at 16:07, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 2:53 PM Fabio Valentini <decathorpe@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2019, 19:33 Kevin Fenzi <kevin@scrye.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 7/15/19 5:43 AM, Fabio Valentini wrote:
>>
>> > (I for one am still semi-regularly building stuff in the mock
>> > fedora-rawhide-i686 chroots, especially for testing if things still
>> > work on 32bit systems (be it armv7hl or i686) - I know that this will
>> > probably continue to work somehow, but making it more complicated is
>> > hostile to developers and packagers who care about their packages
>> > working on all architectures.)
>>
>> Well, it wouldn't be more complicated. Mock would just download from a
>> different repo in that case.
>>
>> Also, if it's 32bit you are testing, perhaps some cheap armv7 device
>> would be a better platform moving forward?
>>
>> kevin
>
>
> I have a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B somewhere, but the experience of trying to build some packages on it a while ago was ... testing my patience, let's say. Maybe a faster SD card would help, but I'm guessing that using "--forcearch armv7hl" to force qemu emulation in mock on my main PC's pretty beefy CPU would still be a better experience. Additionally there's no 32bit arm chroots supported in COPR, which complicates the situation for 32bit support even more.
>
> But that's a bit beside the point I wanted to make. I've been struggling to keep the Java stack building at all (mostly Stewardship SIG packages), and the removal of 32bit support in eclipse has made that even more difficult.
>
> Even still, dozens of Java packages either won't build or won't install on 32bit arches because of that (mostly because gradle isn't installable anymore, because jgit is gone on 32bit). Even the modular Java packages don't support 32bit arches anymore.
>
> If we start to relegate i686 to a tertiary architecture only intended for multilib use (which is basically the effect of this proposal), there'll be even fewer reasons to fix things or keep things working on 32bit. I mean, I'm already tempted to just start dropping things ... because, well, it's not like anybody seems to care about those packages anyway.
>
>

And honestly, i686 is our only useful 32-bit architecture from a
development standpoint. People can iterate quickly on it, and easily
test it.

It is incredibly difficult to deal with 32-bit only issues if armv7hl
is the only thing we have.


OK could all the people who are so interested in i686 get onto the x86_32 mailing list and chime up there about what they are wanting to do? Also start having regular sig meetings and other things which have been pretty dead for about a year? 
 

--
Stephen J Smoogen.