[CentOS-devel] CentOS-5 on i586

Mon Apr 7 15:11:39 UTC 2008
Johnny Hughes <johnny at centos.org>

Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Hi Alan,
> 
> Alan Bartlett wrote:
>>     Overall not everyone can run i686 for whatever reason. The fact
>>     remains IMO
>>     that there is still a fair amount of need for an i586 image
>>     regardless of it
>>     it's for fall back issues or run natively I also believe that this 
>> isn't
>>     catered for by Centos 4 with support that run's out in ~4 years.
>>
>>
>> But surely we should not forget the basic essential of the CentOS 
>> Project - it's equivalence to Upstream's EL. If Upstream support an 
>> i586 in their EL 5 then, yes, CentOS should.
> 
> I very strongly disagree with that statement. We do lots of things that 
> upstream dont - and there is no reason why we cant expand on that. After 
> all CentOS is not driven by a commercial end game ( as upstream is ), 
> were doing things here that we want to, as a community.

Actually ... I don't personally see it as that at all.  We still want to 
minimize changes and i think Alan's comments are correct.

> 
> Also, there was no i586 support in EL4, there is in CentOS-4. Iirc, 
> EL3/CentOS3 have the same relationship.

Right, and we may do it, however if we do it, it will be because there 
is a growing market and it has no impact on the i686 distro.

And the act of modifying anaconda in that way DOES go against what 
CentOS main goal is (a perfect rebuild of sources).

That doesn't mean we won't do it ... it just means we need a very good 
reason to do it :D

> 
> Besides you just completely marginalised the work done for things like 
> the LiveCD, ServerCD's, the entire Plus and Extra repos etc.

I also did not read it like that. All those things are NOT changing 
anything in the main distro, but are adding on to it.

> 
> As the core distribution - sure, the plan is to stick as close to 
> upstream as is possible, legal and acceptable. However, the centos 
> community is just that - a community of people. If there are things that 
> people want to take up, nothing stops them from doing that. The very 
> last argument in the stack should be 'because upstream does not do this, 
> so we wont either'.

But that might be the argument.  For example, we are probably not going 
to add Gnome 2.22 into centos-5 for precisely that reason :D

> 
>> Perhaps i586 support could be provided as an offshoot (which, given 
>> time, will become a dead-end). Support which Manuel, and like minded 
>> persons, could provide (under the watchful eye of one of the core 
>> developers) perhaps?
> 
> i586 support on CentOS5 was always meant to be an 'alternative' install 
> mechanism.
> 

Right ... so all in all, I though Alan's comments were positive and not 
negative.

Either way though, the real issue is that we might provide i586 support 
as an addon feature if it looks like i586 is required for new projects 
.. but the support may be broken at times since upstream does not ensure 
their source compiles with that "--target i586" switch.


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