Re: [PATCH v2 1/6] ia64: Remove support

[Oskari Pirhonen <xxc3ncoredxx@gmail.com>]

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On Fri, May 12, 2023 at 12:41:47 +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hello Ard!
> 
> On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 16:29 +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > > Feel free to keep using it, but please stop demanding that our people
> > > > keep wasting their time on it. If you want to support it in Debian,
> > > > you can carry it as a downstream patch and shoulder the maintenance
> > > > burden.
> > > 
> > > Who is "our people"? Do you think that you are part of the community and
> > > I am not? I don't think this kind of hostility is justified. Neither you
> > > nor I own this project.
> > > 
> > 
> > Apologies - I had meant to type 'other people' not 'our people'. I
> > rarely contribute to GRUB myself, so I wouldn't consider myself more a
> > part of this community than anyone else.
> > 
> > But my point remains: I have inferred from your response (and your
> > involvement in similar discussions around the Linux kernel) that you
> > would prefer Itanium support to be retained, right?
> 
> Not necessarily. I am generally not opposed to removing ia64 support, but it
> should happen in a coordinated form where downstreams and users are involved.
> 
> Just dropping support from random projects without prior coordination seems
> like the wrong approach to me. I would suggest posting your plans to the
> distributions mailing list [1], Debian's ia64 mailing list [2], the Gentoo
> developer mailing list [3], the Linux ia64 mailing list [4] and maybe the
> NetBSD ia64 mailing list [5].
> 
> If you don't get any objections there, I am not going to object either. I just
> want this to happen in an ordered manner.
> 

For future reference, might I suggest the following "distributions" list
as well: distributions@lists.linux.dev

It's a relatively new list for cross-distro collaboration/PSAs. You can
find the archives here [6].

- Oskari

> > So could you explain who you think should carry the maintenance
> > burden? IA64 will be the only EFI architecture in GRUB that does not
> > boot via an EFI stub in Linux, and this deviation means that retaining
> > support for it is going to take actual developer and maintainer
> > bandwidth. GRUB gets very little of that as it is, which means that
> > keeping IA64 support alive comes at the cost of worse support for
> > other architectures and platforms. (The series that this patch is part
> > of breaks the ia64 build, and i i struggle to see why i should care
> > about that)
> > 
> > Very few of those people have access to such systems to begin with
> > (probably none), and the companies that manufactured them stopped
> > supporting them in the open source years ago, so testing these changes
> > is not straight-forward, making it unreasonable to demand this from
> > contributors. Also, it is unclear to me why the needs of the few
> > people that do still run such a system are not served by a build based
> > on today's GRUB tree, and why ia64 support needs to be retained going
> > forward.
> 
> Well, that's why I am suggesting to coordinate this properly and ask potential
> users of the code whether they are okay with the removal.
> 
> Thanks,
> Adrian
> 
> [1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions
> [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/
> [3] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/
> [4] https://marc.info/?l=linux-ia64&r=1&w=1
> [5] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/tindex.html
> 

[6] https://lore.kernel.org/distributions/

> -- 
>  .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> : :' :  Debian Developer
> `. `'   Physicist
>   `-    GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546  0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
> 
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> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel

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