Date: Fri, 29 May 2020 05:08:32 +0000
To: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
From: Mogens Jensen <mogens-jensen@protonmail.com>
Cc: Alpine develmopment <~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org>
Reply-To: Mogens Jensen <mogens-jensen@protonmail.com>
Subject: Re: Can we drop armhf (armv6) after v3.12?
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ssage =E2=80=90=E2=80=90=E2=80=90=E2=80=90=E2=80=90=E2=80=90=E2=80=90
On Thursday, May 28, 2020 8:47 AM, Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org> wr=
ote:

> Hi!
>
> Can we drop the armhf architecture after 3.12 release?
>
> It means that we will continue support armfh with 3.12 for two mor
> years, but edge and next release 3.13 will be without armhf.
>
> This means that we effectively drop support for Raspberry pi 1 and
> raspberry pi zero which are armv6. This is also the hardware we have
> kernel for.
>
> The reason is that there are increasing number of issues that are not
> fixed upstream. For example:
> https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-65246
>
> We will also need to rebuild all our 32 bit architectures from scratch
> when upgrading to musl 1.2 due to time64. It requires significant
> effort to do that and it would be nice to only need to do it for x86
> and armv7, and drop armhf.
>
> Are there any good reasons to why we should keep armhf?
>
> Are there other reasons to why we should drop it?
>
> -nc
>
> PS. This was previously been discussed for 3.10 release:
> https://lists.alpinelinux.org/~alpine/devel/<20190404112525.4b04fdeb%40nc=
opa-desktop.copa.dup.pw>#<CAGP1gyPCsaHh+85g0QX-Cu40K-5Vd7xqLTV2aGiUgUr+Rdrd=
FQ@mail.gmail.com>

It would be very sad to see armhf dropped from Alpine. BusyBox,
uClibc/musl and as it says on the frontpage "Small. Simple. Secure",
Alpine has always been about small and embedded devices, so if now
support is going to be removed for some of the most famous embedded
systems, then what's the point?

There are millions of Raspberry Pi 1, Zero and ZeroW that can have a
long and useful life with Alpine. There are NO lightweight and systemd
free distro that are as good as Alpine for these devices (or anything
else).

Most of them lives as small headless servers or do embedded work, so
as already suggested in this thread, maybe there is a middel ground
of not supporting problematic UI stuff?

Thanks to everyone working on Alpine Linux.


Regards,
Mogens Jensen