[Sussex] Debian news...

[Geoffrey J. Teale]

Colin Tuckley <colin at tuckley.org> writes:

> There has been discussion on the Debian lists about this. There is a
> proposal to reduce the number of supported archs in the main release. The
> problem is that only the main release is supported by security updates,
> which would leave other sub-releases or whatever they get called with no
> security updates and thus not usable for serious applications.

There will come a time when they'll pretty much have to drop some of
the older RISC CPUs as GCC is dropping them in release 4.  However, I
imagine Debian isn't going to be doing a gcc4 release for quite
sometime yet.

I'd actually think it would be a real shame for Debian to support
fewer architectures, it's one of the very few distros that has any
level of support for minority Linux users.  That said it's also true
that those other platforms haven't always been very well supported.

Debian has never successfully installed on my Sun Ultra5, or rather the
install disks have never booted successfully.  It's probably the case
that I could have fiddled more or built a custom boot disk, but it was
easier to install Gentoo at the time.  These days that box runs
OpenBSD, which works very well on that machine and gives me a nice
secure Apache install.

-- 
Geoff Teale
CMed Technology            -   gteale at cmedresearch.com
Free Software Foundation   -   tealeg at member.fsf.org