Re: deprecate i960 now?

[Stan Shebs <shebs@apple.com>]

Joe Buck wrote:

>Stan Shebs writes:
>
>>[ re: obsoleting the i960]
>>It would be somewhat of a departure to move from obsoleting long-dead
>>architectures to taking away ones that, in Intel's words (in their
>>FAQ) are still shipping in "high volumes".
>>
>
>If we have no maintainer and no i960 processors, and the gdb folks are
>taking away resources, we can't maintain it.  We can have an alternate
>designation in such cases, "orphaned" rather than "deprecated", meaning
>it's on hold until volunteers step up to the challenge of keeping it
>going.
>
Weighing the very real confusion of having dead code in CVS (will
infrastructure patches have to include i960 changes?  would I still
have to fix the known i960 problems in libobjc? :-) ) vs the vague
fears of bad publicity for dropping old targets, I think I'd rather
rely on CVS and delete the code.

>Sometimes the threat of losing support smokes a skilled user or two out of
>the woodwork who has the incentive to keep the tool he relies on going.
>
That was the theory of obsoleting non-multi-arch configs in GDB; all
it needed was someone to spend a couple days on a mostly mechanical
conversion, and even then there was nobody (me included) willing to
spend that much time on the i960, which says something...

There may be nothing to my concern too - back in Cygnus days, the
"available for every embedded target you can think of" was a valuable
line in the hard sell to potential GNU customers, but there's been
some consolidation in embedded-land and GCC is now more generally
accepted too, so I don't know if the breadth claim is still important.

Stan