Wednesday 29 June 2016

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

Hi Bryan,

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 11:02:02AM -0400, Bryan Quigley wrote:
> I'll work on creating a new public survey (and possibly a separate
> partner/customer one).

> Based on my previous one, my biggest concerns were for Lubuntu/Xubuntu.
> With recent memory testing [1] it's even more true for Lubuntu. (And if
> you only <512 MB of Ram - Docker, ZFS and system intensive games likely
> won't matter to you, and Firefox is much better in low-memory than Chrome
> anyway)

> I don't see any point in continuing to build i386 cloud-images for
> 16.10/17.04/17.10 if we're just going to drop them for 18.04.

+1 for dropping images at the beginning of the LTS meta-cycle, instead of at
the end. It avoids setting wrong expectations that i386 will continue to be
supported, it saves us effort carrying it forward, and it also gives us
more room to reverse course if it turns out we were mistaken about the need
to continue carrying those images.

> I'd like to see most flavors drop i386 before 18.04 (might as well do it
> now..) but we keep the 18.04 kernel and d-i (and Lubuntu) for i386. I
> don't see much reason to separate the userspace security support, but we
> will see what the surveys say.

As a practical matter, as long as we are carrying the architecture in the
archive for a release, we have a requirement internally for some sort of
cloud image for that release (whether or not this is supported publically)
and a kernel to boot it with. And this base image would need to be de facto
security supported, even if there is no official security support for the
packages in main.

We have the capability to mark different support periods in the archive by
package×architecture, and should certainly do this. Most people don't look
at this information, however; I think that for packages that we know won't
be LTS security-supportable on a particular architecture, we should consider
dropping those binaries from the archive as well.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org