Dropping pre-i686 from the archive

[Matthias Klose]

Matt Zimmerman schrieb:
> 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 don't have exact numbers, I remember two or three for gcc-4.0, plus 
one leading to bad code compiled by gcj (PR 23602). The latter one was 
not fixed, but worked around by disabling certain combinations of options.

> 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.

that might be worth doing. wrappers for those applications should then 
print/popup a message, that they cannot run on non-supported hardware.

   Matthias