Change of scope and target market for i386

[Jeremy Bicha]

On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 1:01 PM, Dimitri John Ledkov <xnox at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Flavor leads and developers, please consider if the above structure
> would also be suitable for your target market and user bases. I.e.
> Continue to provide packages and the upgrade path, but discontinue to
> manufacture the i386 full-sized / live-cd installation media.

Thank you for restarting this conversation.

Ubuntu GNOME was preparing [1] to announce that we were not going to
support any architecture besides amd64 after Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, when of
course our announcement was made obsolete by a bigger announcement.

I believe Dimitri is suggesting that Ubuntu Desktop may not want to
offer i386 install images any more as early as 17.10, but perhaps
still allow existing users to upgrade to 18.04 LTS so that they are
not stranded on a non-LTS release.

My opinion is that we ought to block update-manager and
do-release-upgrade from permitting upgrades for "i386" past 18.04 LTS
for flavors who will be ending i386 support.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGNOME/32bit_support

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha