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

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

Hello Ard!

On Thu, 2023-05-11 at 16:29 +0200, Ard Biesheuvel wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Who is "our people"? Do you think that you are part of the community and
> > I am not? I don't think this kind of hostility is justified. Neither you
> > nor I own this project.
> > 
> 
> Apologies - I had meant to type 'other people' not 'our people'. I
> rarely contribute to GRUB myself, so I wouldn't consider myself more a
> part of this community than anyone else.
> 
> But my point remains: I have inferred from your response (and your
> involvement in similar discussions around the Linux kernel) that you
> would prefer Itanium support to be retained, right?

Not necessarily. I am generally not opposed to removing ia64 support, but it
should happen in a coordinated form where downstreams and users are involved.

Just dropping support from random projects without prior coordination seems
like the wrong approach to me. I would suggest posting your plans to the
distributions mailing list [1], Debian's ia64 mailing list [2], the Gentoo
developer mailing list [3], the Linux ia64 mailing list [4] and maybe the
NetBSD ia64 mailing list [5].

If you don't get any objections there, I am not going to object either. I just
want this to happen in an ordered manner.

> So could you explain who you think should carry the maintenance
> burden? IA64 will be the only EFI architecture in GRUB that does not
> boot via an EFI stub in Linux, and this deviation means that retaining
> support for it is going to take actual developer and maintainer
> bandwidth. GRUB gets very little of that as it is, which means that
> keeping IA64 support alive comes at the cost of worse support for
> other architectures and platforms. (The series that this patch is part
> of breaks the ia64 build, and i i struggle to see why i should care
> about that)
> 
> Very few of those people have access to such systems to begin with
> (probably none), and the companies that manufactured them stopped
> supporting them in the open source years ago, so testing these changes
> is not straight-forward, making it unreasonable to demand this from
> contributors. Also, it is unclear to me why the needs of the few
> people that do still run such a system are not served by a build based
> on today's GRUB tree, and why ia64 support needs to be retained going
> forward.

Well, that's why I am suggesting to coordinate this properly and ask potential
users of the code whether they are okay with the removal.

Thanks,
Adrian

> [1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions
> [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ia64/
> [3] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/
> [4] https://marc.info/?l=linux-ia64&r=1&w=1
> [5] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ia64/tindex.html

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer
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