dear Mark,

On Fri, 28 Sep 2018, Mark Hindley wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 28, 2018 at 01:48:01PM +0100, Mark Hindley wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I have been migrating a venerable headless sytem from Debian Wheezy to Devuan.
> >
> > The migration from Debian Wheezy to Devuan Jessie was fine, however upgrading to
> > Ascii has failed with Illegal Instruction faults.
>
> It seems I missed this announcement:
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/05/msg00001.html
>
> Is there any chance Devuan might revert this?

It would be good and I'd be really in favor of reverting this
choice. When the thread was out more than one people in Devuan were
really opposed and there was some discussion on DNG about it I
believe.

Yet the chance lies with our growth, since this would mean a major
step which we haven't engaged yet, that of being able to recompile *all*
Debian packages (not just Devuan overlays) for a different arch.

ATM there are two factors holding us back from such a move:

1. we aren't that big (yet?), we don't have the support that Debian
has from industrial and academic partners in terms of reliable
computation resources, nor Debian is keen to share them.

2. looking at the overlay situation in beowulf, we may have even less
packages to curate in the coming stable releases, orienting us to stay
with a "somehow softer" overlay approach without the need to setup big
operations.

I wish we'd have the ambition to step up and think that 1. should not
be addressed as a Debian / Devuan debacle, but brought up as an issue
to SPI (software for public interest) claiming they are violating
their mandate by serving only the interest of Debian when its
financial and technical infrastructure is not also deployed real
public interests, but only the interest of the lobby that has taken
over Debian. I think we need someone like Bruce Perens or other
talented lawyers to look into this and say if its possible.

Until then, I'm afraid we cannot steer the binary target policy of
Debian, no matter how destructive that is for its ecosystem.

ciao