General Resolution: Force AMD64 architecture into Sarge

Time Line
Proposer
Seconds
Text
Quorum
Data and Statistics
Majority Requirement
Outcome

Time Line

Proposal and amendment	Tuesday, July 13^th, 2004	2004
Discussion Period:	2004	2004
Voting Period	2004	2004

Seconds

Robert Millan [rmh@debian.org]
Xavier Roche [xavier@debian.org]
Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt [he@debian.org]
Alexander Wirt [formorer@debian.org]

Text

Force the AMD64 into Sarge and into Sid, overriding policy violations.

The actual text of the GR is:

The Debian Project,

based on its Social Contract stating that its priorities are its users and free software,

and acknowledging that its users want to take advantage of all this architecture's features,

hereby resolves:

that the next Debian GNU/Linux release, code named sarge, will include the amd64 architecture, based on the work currently hosted at https://debian-amd64.alioth.debian.org/ ;
that non-compliance of that amd64 distribution with the Linux Standard Base specification for IA32 will not be considered a release-critical bug;
that we will include it immediately in the "sid" distribution and auto-building infrastructure, and take all appropriate steps so that inclusion won't delay the release of sarge any further.

Rationale

With our current release time frame, AMD64 is likely to become the most sold architecture for personal computers way before the release that will follow sarge. If we don't release sarge with AMD64 support, our users will be very disappointed. The popularity of the debian-amd64 project just shows what they are waiting for.

Furthermore, the AMD64 architecture is mostly ready. It now builds just as many packages as our other release architectures, and it has a working installer.

The only valid reasons for not including it are lack of LSB compliance (which can still be easily achieved with an i386 chroot) and mirror space (which will be saved using partial mirroring). Another reason seems to be the lack of cooperation of some developers. This resolution intends to make everyone cooperate in this direction. Of course, the author of this resolution would welcome if the people responsible would just do it, thereby making this resolution superfluous.