Debian Etch, the next major version of the Linux distribution, will only be available on eight architectures, with four getting the boot. Steve Langasek, a release manager at Debian, said in a mailing list posting last week that the official release of Etch, which is due in December 2006, will not be ported to systems based on the ARM, Motorola 68k, IBM S/390 and Sun SPARC architectures. . The move to cut down the number of architectures supported was discussed during a project meeting in March 2005. The Debian release team agreed that it was not sustainable to continue making coordinated releases for as many architectures as the current version supports. "This [move] will drastically reduce the architecture coordination required in testing, giving us a more limber release process and (it is hoped) a much shorter release cycle on the order of 12-18 months," said Langasek in an email at the time. The link for this article located at ZDNet is no longer available. . Fedora intends to embrace six platforms for its upcoming release, dropping two to streamline development and optimize the update timeline.. Debian Architecture, Linux Release Management, Platform Support. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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