[RULE] Thread on fedora-devel about dropping i486 support

[C David Rigby]

M. Fioretti wrote:

>>All of this brings me to the point of this message.  If Fedora is
>>going to be dropping core support for older processors and older
>>architectures, is Red Hat/Fedora where Rule needs to, pardon me,
>>hang its hat?
> 
> [...]
> 
> 
>>I certainly don't want to start any kind of distro war here, as
>>those are almost always completely useless.
> 
> 
> I agree 100%. While, *personally*, I'll stick with RH/Fedora as long
> as I can (out of pure lazyness and lack of time, *nothing* else):
> 
 > 1) we have said several times since the beginning that sub-projects to
 > do the "RULE thing" for other distro/CPUs are more than welcome on the
 > RULE website, as long as somebody jumps up and volunteers for them. So
 > everybody can exchange compilation/configuration tricks and what
 > not. And we can help more people save money, and delay more pollution
 > from working computers going to the landfill.
 >

I have thought about this a lot also, but knowing RedHat slightly better 
than other distros, I have kept my head down.  {8->.

When RedHat split itself into RHEL and Fedora, I began looking at other 
distros and eventually settled on Debian.  There is an interesting HOWTO 
here about creating custom Debian distros that I hope to read completely 
in the near future.

http://people.debian.org/~tille/debian-med/talks/paper-cdd/debian-cdd.html/index.en.html

One of our goals is, however, to avoid creating our own distro.  So, 
RH/Fedora is a good choice, as is Debian, when you consider that a 
Debian "custom" distro is really just a reduced set of the available 
Debian packages aimed at a specific setting.


 > Thanks for the link. I have read it, and encourage all members to have
 > a look at it. The interesting things are that:
 >
 > dropping 486 won't really buy anything, according to uber-geeks. i386
 > might be another matter

 From reading the thread, it seems that the core issue is that Fedora 
wishes to move exclusively to the use of NPTL (Native POSIX Threading 
Library).  The 486 architecture can support it, the 386 cannot.  So, 
continuing to track FC means that we have to also eventually drop 
support for 386 machines.  In particular, from that discussion it seems 
to be that rpm already compiles against NPTL and thus is going to be 
problematic for us to use in an installer that must run on a 386.

Am I understanding this correctly?

C David Rigby

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