XXI century and still using 386 packages...

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 02:31:41PM +0200, Xan wrote:
> Perhaps it were good thing to have both types of packages: for every program, 
> build i386, i486, i586 and i686 packages. Does it suppose so amount of work to 
> do that?. These subarchitectures are similar, so the packages have to be more 
> similar. So I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the maintain of these four 
> subarch's is much easy than maintain a new arch.

Not really, if we want to keep (a) our mirrors and (b) our sanity when
debugging problems. Shipping four times the number of packages in the
ordinary way would lose us mirrors, and thus increase bandwidth costs;
shipping binary diffs from i386 to ix86 would vastly increase the
complexity of our package distribution network and thereby increase
support costs, the initial development costs of such an option would be
considerable, and in a number of cases binary diffs wouldn't even save
much mirroring space anyway. In any case, most of those optimisation
settings provide very little value to the user except in highly
specialised circumstances; we considered all this and decided it wasn't
worth the costs.

> So perhaps it could be factible to do that, but I'm not the technician....

This kind of topic comes up very frequently and has been answered many
times; we'd appreciate an end to it at some point. :-) It's polite to
search the archives for previous mentions of a topic before bringing it
up again, especially on a busy list like ubuntu-devel. The higher the
signal-to-noise ratio on this list, the more work we can get done.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]