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

[Steve McIntyre]

On Thu, May 11, 2023 at 02:17:57PM +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>On Thu, 11 May 2023 at 14:14, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
><glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 14:06 +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
>> > Itanium IA-64 support is obsolete, and implements its own flavor of EFI
>> > boot that deviates from other architectures. Given that IA64 is unused
>> > and unmaintained, it makes no sense to pretend that the EFI changes we
>> > are making are tested or supported on IA64, so let's just get rid of it.
>>
>> But I just recently tested GRUB from git on IA64 and it worked without
>> any problems. We're using GRUB to boot Debian on IA64.
>>
>
>IA-64 is a dead platform, and a waste of electricity.
>
>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.

And I'm not convinced that as the Debian maintainer I care enough. At
some point old machines and old architectures die, it's a fact of
life. If people insist on keeping their old machines alive for the
sake of it, then at some point they also will have to accept staying
on old software too.

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
“Changing random stuff until your program works is bad coding
 practice, but if you do it fast enough it’s Machine Learning.”
   -- https://twitter.com/manisha72617183