Re: missing 64bit ports

[Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com>]

On Jul 15, 2015, at 12:28 PM, Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> 
> - Shall we remove all 32b-bit only orphaned packages for which we don't
>  get a maintainer until, say, end of August?

If a package is available only for 32-bit, there should be a place to learn that prior to running setup.exe.  The fact that some items are on that list because they’re orphaned and thus have no immediate prospect of getting off the list is inconsequential to the end users who consult it.

If your goal is to evaporate this list, I’d prefer that you just removed orphaned packages from both the 32- and 64-bit repositories on the justification that Cygwin should only offer packages available for both architectures.  And going forward, refuse new uploads if packages for both architectures aren’t provided promptly.

There can be exceptions, as with the recent libsigsegv thing.  I also thought I saw some talk about Perl currently being somewhat desynchronized at the moment.  I’m not talking about such cases.  The existing packages are maintained, and ownership of the solution for the missing packages is known.

I think this is going to far, but it would be well within your prerogative.

> - We should probably consider to remove the mingw.org packages.  All
>  of them.  They are hopelessly outdated and mingw-w64 does the same
>  job better hands down.

I can’t see why anyone would adopt those old abandoned packages.  Not only do I have no objection to you nuking them, I think it would be an actual improvement, since it removes a point of confusion in the setup.exe package selection screen.