[conspire] Cobalt Qube2 revival

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> Debian wants to drop support for architectures that can't get at least 50
> users to tell them not to.

My understanding of the Vancouver Proposal[1] is not that they intend to
_drop_ those platforms, exactly, but rather that they would cease being
"first-class-citizen platforms" in the sense of coordinated
stable-branch releases being always delayed until they are in a
qualified release-ready state  on all platforms.  This is in part (my
interpretation) a response to how well Ubuntu is doing with its release
schedule, with just three CPU platforms.

The "second-class-citizen" (SCC) platforms would still have releases
whenever their various development crews can so arrange.  Quoting the
Vancouver Proposal:

    Architectures that are no longer being considered for stable
    releases are not going to be left out in the cold.  The SCC
    infrastructure is intended as a long-term option for these other
    architectures, and the ftpmasters also intend to provide porter
    teams with the option of releasing periodic (or not-so-periodic)
    per-architecture snapshots of unstable.

And I tend not to care particularly about stable-branch releases,
anyway.  Tracking testing/unstable suits me just fine, generally.

Anyway:

> I don't know what use getting counted is after an arch hits that magic
> number, and apparently others don't either, since more people have
> been counted for m68k than for PowerPC. It would be a shame if they
> drop support for the Qube this close to the threshold. The mipsel port
> needs only two more registered users to make it! Are you one of them?
> If you have overlooked this, the URL is:
> 
> http://buildd.net/cgi/archvote.phtml

I hadn't known about that, so I've now registered my voice for mipsel,
making me user #52 for that arch, at this date.

Personally, I think the Vancouver Proposal makes a lot of sense for
Debian.  (First-class-citizen arches would be i386, powerpc, ia64, and
amd64.  And I think Ubuntu made the right choice in ignoring Itanic, but 
presumably some others don't agree.)

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/03/msg00012.html