Installation Media and supportability of i386 in 18.04 LTS Re: Ubuntu Desktop on i386

[Robert Ancell]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 4:41 AM Steve Langasek <steve.langasek at ubuntu.com>
wrote:

>
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 08:18:54AM +0100, Martin Wimpress wrote:
> > Excuse the top posting, only have a phone available.
>
> > Ubuntu MATE works with a few organisations around the world, one in my
> own
> > country, that refurbish donated computers, install them with Ubuntu MATE
> > and give (or sell them for next to nothing) to schools, disadvantaged
> > families and people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford a computer.
>
> > I'll get in touch with them and find how, or if, this decision would
> affect
> > them.
>
> For various reasons (e.g. compatibility with legacy 32-bit apps on the
> desktop; IoT devices running Ubuntu Core), we should not expect to be
> dropping i386 as an architecture from the archive before 18.04.
>
> Individual flavor communities should therefore feel comfortable making
> their
> own decision about whether to continue providing i386 images in 18.04,
> independent of what we decide for the Ubuntu Desktop and Server flavors -
> with the caveat that, since the forcing function for dropping these flavors
> is security supportability of key applications, community flavors should
> avoid representing to their users a level of support that they are in no
> position to deliver on.
>
>
It may be worth considering disabling i386 builds for individual packages
to reduce the support costs. That way the core packages can build for i386
and be used in IoT systems while the graphical application stacks can stop
building for i386. There would be some challenges to negotiate overlap with
the flavours (i.e. MATE might want their stack i386 and Unity not) and a
practical way to do this (we don't want to have an Ubuntu version of the
packages that come from Debian with only a change to the "Architecture"
field in debian/control).

--Robert
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