Hi John, On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 2:02 AM John M. Harris, Jr. <johnmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The thing is, i686 still works. The kernel still builds as well, without issue. I have no idea what the issues that have been mentioned are, and I've kept asking. Nobody has given me an answer. Nobody has pointed me to an issue, or I'd be working on that in my free time. Here you go: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1489998 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=179258 Though from my own experience, I'm pretty sure that there are plenty more x86_32 issues that have gone unreported. While I did not have what I thought would be the required amount of time to commit to the x86 SIG to be a "full member", I am one of the handful of people that advocated keeping i686 in Fedora and until last February I actively tried to at least reproduce the issues reported and help with debugging. Even back then, it was apparent that we could only try to maintain a subset of packages in Fedora, since many upstream developers just could not test their software on i686, or 32-bit hardware lacked capabilities that were common among 64-bit CPUs, e.g. SSE2. Some developers were adamant that they no longer cared about 32-bit. The kernel team was already spread thin and they made it pretty clear that should we decide to keep the x86_32 arch, it would be up to us to resolve any bugs that came up. The reality of the matter was that only 2 or 3 people had the skills to actually provide fixes after a problem was identified and reproduced. Quite often, bugs were found that were hardware-dependent and not everyone had access to said buggy hardware. On the x86 mailing list's page it says: "We are looking for active participants who can help test and debug Fedora on x86_32 hardware. From this testing, the project will be better able to access which 32 bit hardware is still supportable." Nobody else stepped up in the meantime and some of the comments flying back and forth these last days are very unfair to the people who actually did the work to keep the arch working. As for me, I moved to another country almost two years ago and had to leave all of my beloved relics behind. I could only take an Atom netbook with me and debugging stuff on that was no fun - when I could actually reproduce a bug. Eventually I ran out of time to spare. Like others suggested, you, Victor V. Shkamerda and others who have complained about the state of things, you do have options. Just be realistic about the amount of work required. > LibreOffice and Firefox both build for i686 without issue. Further, I don't know software that requires more than 4 GiB of memory to compile. On my Gentoo workstation I had switched to the LibreOffice (or was it OpenOffice?) binary around 2011 and to the firefox binary in 2014. Even back then, I had to increase swap size to accommodate the compilation needs of packages that were usually dependencies of packages I cared about. Best regards, A. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
