Re: Supporting armel/armhf in wheezy-lts
(trimming the cc list a bit since this is mostly a +1)
On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 10:03:45AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I know that we decided to not support arm* for wheezy-lts during last
> Debconf but it turns out that Freexian has been contacted by a potential LTS
> sponsor selling arm* products:
>
> Openblocks A7 (armel)
> http://openblocks.plathome.co.jp/products/obs_a/a7/spec.html
> Opneblocks AX3 (armhf)
> http://openblocks.plathome.co.jp/products/obs_a/ax3/
>
> The decision has been taken on the fact that we knew of nobody that was
> really interested on running wheezy on those architectures (we expected
> armhf users to run jessie and armel users to be only hobbyists). But here
> we have a sponsor willing to sign on a contract saying us « our customers wish
> to use Debian 7 OS continuously so that we are planning to sponsor the LTS
> efforts for two years. »
>
> Are there teams/persons with objections to adding armel/armhf to the set of
> supported architectures for wheezy-lts ?
>
> I have put in copy:
> - ftpmasters, they have to agree to keep hosting armel/armhf on security.debian.org
> - ARM porters, mostly to ensure that buildd maintainers are OK with this
> - Debian System Administrators as this might have an impact on the lifetime
> of the arm systems running the wheezy auto-builders
>
> Obviously this does have an impact on the work of LTS team members too since
> we will have to monitor ARM* builds too and it might mean more work for the
> kernel maintenance too.
>
> Since we have a single sponsor interested in ARM support, maybe we can introduce
> it on a provisional/experimental basis so that we can drop it if the sponsorship
> does not materialize (or is not enough to cover for the supplementary work). It
> might also be an opportunity to make a call for other armel/armhf users to join
> as sponsors (if you know some that we should contact, please let us know).
I'm all for it (although it's easy to say for me since the most burden
will probably be on the kernel team) and having it as experimental with
a single sponsor seems sensible.
I assume the level of sponsorship offered is reasonable to support an
arm port? I still wonder how we could would make it simpler to have this
support end up at the right places (i.e. LTS gets the sponsorship while
other teams like release team, security team also have additional work)?
It seems the raspberry pi foundation removed the wheezy based raspbian
from the download page but I wonder if we should reach out to them since
I assume there are lots of arm based devices still running wheezy and
they would certainly benefit from arm support (although they have to
recompile). Does anybody have any contacts there?
Cheers,
-- Guido
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