Retiring the sparc32 port

Greetings,

For the last couple of years the sparc32 port did not have an active
upstream maintainer, so the task of kernel maintenance has been
shifted on to the developers and contributors, working on Debian's
sparc port. Lack of upstream support made it something of a challenge
to bring it to release quality for etch. Even though we deemed it
suitable for release, there were quite a few problems, which a
well-maintained port should not have. As there was little to none
continued interest in supporting sparc32 in Debian, a discussion was
started on the debian-sparc mailing list about the future of sparc32
for lenny. In particular, it was suggested that support for it should
be dropped in the next Debian's release [0].

While there were a few objections, nobody stepped up to the plate and
volunteered to become a new sparc32 maintainer. Thus, the only option
we have at this point is to officially declare that lenny will not
include support for sparc32 hardware (this decision has been
coordinated with the release, installer and kernel teams). Newer
sparc64 hardware will be supported as before, and we hope that we will
be able to improve the performance by optimizing compilation of
packages for Ultrasparc CPUs.

[0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-sparc/2007/04/msg00044.html

Best regards,

-- 
Jurij Smakov