Robbins Changed His Mind, Funtoo Shifts to “Hobby Mode”
Quoting: Robbins Changed His Mind, Funtoo Shifts to “Hobby Mode” —
As we informed you at the end of last month, Robbins announced the termination of the project. Three weeks later, however, he has changed that original intention.
Okay, what does this “Hobby Mode” mean? In short, it will continue to receive his personal attention and maintenance. Funtoo users will still be able to perform updates and maintain their systems, ensuring that despite the scaled-back approach, the OS will remain functional and largely up-to-date for those who choose to stick with it.
However, significant changes are on the horizon for the Funtoo community infrastructure. The project will discontinue its bug tracker and community code repositories, shifting the forums and wiki to read-only mode.
The Register:
-
Gentoo drops IA64 – and Funtoo fork is faltering
News is bubbling up both from the Gentoo project and its successor, the tellingly named "Funtoo" – what Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins did next.
The source-based Gentoo Linux distribution, which still supports a wide range of CPU architectures, will soon support one less. The project leaders announced that it is removing support for Intel's Itanium processor family.
It had little choice in this. Like any other distro, Gentoo relies on upstream support for a platform in order to keep it working. The Linux kernel nearly removed Itanic support in February 2023, and finally did so in kernel 6.7 last October. As we predicted the following month, nobody has stepped up to maintain out-of-tree support.
That was followed earlier this year with confirmation that GCC 15 would also drop Itanium support. While distros with fixed release cycles can keep things around for a little longer – for instance, antiX Linux 23 still offers the option of kernel 4.9 – this is not true for a rolling-release distro such as Gentoo, which is based on the ever-changing current upstream code. Although GCC 15 is not out yet, once a CPU architecture is not supported in either the kernel itself or the compilers used to build a kernel, that really is a hard block on Gentoo supporting the Itanic.