Dropping pre-i686 from the archive

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:00:05AM +0100, Matthias Klose wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman schrieb:
> >As a user of just such an embedded system with Ubuntu, my personal bias is
> >to preserve this compatibility.  My understanding is that we would gain the
> >following in exchange for abandoning support for these low-end platforms:
> >
> >- Some simplicity in glibc packaging (no more libc6-i686)
> >
> >- The possibility of a small performance benefit for higher-end systems,
> >  though this is notoriously tricky to measure and we have no useful data
> 
> besides an eventually small performance hit, we could you use the same 
> target for code generation that everybody else uses and gets more tested 
> by upstream. AFAIK Ubuntu and Debian are the only distributions 
> generating code for i486.

How often to we encounter code generation bugs which are specific to this
configuration?

I'm quite open to the idea of building certain heavyweight package sets (GNOME,
KDE, OpenOffice.org, etc.) for i686 if there is a demonstrable performance
benefit.  I'm much less convinced about the idea of doing this universally,
especially considering thin client deployments.

-- 
 - mdz