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Based on "The question of whether powerpc remains an architecture in the main archive or moves to ports is one for FTP masters, not the release team." That wou
by VLM 10y ago
Based on "The question of whether powerpc remains an architecture in the main archive
or moves to ports is one for FTP masters, not the release team."
That would imply to me you can continue to apt-get update upgrade into eternity as long as you're following unstable or testing. They'll just never be a new stable again for PPC. Someday the FTP masters will remove PPC as an architecture, everything ends someday, but thats not the topic of this notification.
There's a process where the release team freezes and grabs a "testing" and polishes it and cleans it up until it feels its a "stable" and that's never happening for PPC again, just too many release critical architecture specific bugs or the autobuilders are too slow or nobody wants to own PPC as a release arch or ...
The people and teams who generate binaries for unstable and testing are not changing their behavior per this press release, this is a release team announcement.
Needless to say this has nothing to do with stuff like online documentation or mailing lists WRT all the "Debian drops support" type of stories. All the release means is unless something very surprising happens you're not getting a 9.0 install disk. ftpmaster isn't rm -Rf ing the arch, nobodies shutting down nothing, etc..
I mostly hang out with the freebsd world but I hung out in Debian world for a bit less than two decades, so I might be a little out of date, but probably not much.
- dmm 10y agoUnfortunately powerpc will probably be removed from sid/unstable just like sparc recently was. The binaries are generated by extensive architecture that is a lot of work to maintain and needs enthusiastic developers to keep everything running and if that were the case then they wouldn't have removed it as a release arch. It may be added to debian-ports which is simultaneously the nursery for new debian archs and the nursing home for the abandoned which still have some support. ppc64 is there, sparc didn't make it. The attention has shifted to sparc64. I was a Debian/powerpc user for many years and I helped fix builds and ported new packages. But all my macs died and the limitations of the machines available make it harder to justify replacing them from ebay. I imagine many other devs had similar experiences.