add ppc deprecation post

Author: q66

_posts/2026-03-13-retiring-powerpc.md

@@ -0,0 +1,62 @@
+---
+title: Plans to possibly retire the big-endian PowerPC/POWER platforms
+layout: post
+excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
+---
+
+Unless circumstances change, we are planning to retire support for the
+big-endian 32-bit PowerPC and 64-bit POWER platforms. Read below for
+when and why and how you can potentially change this.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+## Reasons
+
+We've been supporting these platforms in Chimera since a while back,
+with ppc64 being suppported in repos since the middle of 2023 and 32-bit
+ppc a while later.
+
+We brought up the platform support to give people interested in the platform
+a base to bring the platform towards greater usability and fix the long-standing
+bugs that plague it. This has not happened, and so far things have been getting
+very slowly worse instead.
+
+Occasionally users come in looking to test it and often expect a fully working
+platform but generally quickly lose interest when faced with various issues
+and in the end nothing gets fixed.
+
+For instance, it has not been possible to run a working GPU either platform
+for several years, due to unfixed regressions in Mesa, requiring use of the
+old Amber branch to get these working (which most people opt for and which
+also ends up counter-productive for fixing things upstream).
+
+Likewise, there has not been an up to date web browser, and things are looking
+to regress further e.g. with WebKit having adopted Skia for rendering (WebKit
+was the sole web engine left where rendering didn't have broken colors).
+
+We don't have a dedicated maintainer for the platform and so far I (q66) have
+been working on keeping things at least building but I don't have the resources
+or motivation or real interest in keeping this going.
+
+Our build infrastructure for this is also lacking, with both platforms being
+built on a single virtual machine hosted at OSUOSL. The performance is for most
+part acceptable but e.g. we're frequently running out of disk space as the
+repos grow as the machine is barely capable of hosting two sets of repos.
+
+I have some POWER9 hardware that could be set up as a build machine to fix
+this but I'm not sure if this is worth running if I'm going to be the only
+person giving this attention, so for now this is not going to happen.
+
+## Timeframe
+
+Therefore, in order to lighten my workload I plan to retire the repositories
+and builders by July 2026.
+
+In the meantime, if someone steps up and is willing to dedicate time and
+resources to maintaining things well, actually using it, and fixing the
+issues that make it unusable for most people, I am willing to retract this
+decision and set up a better builder, but only if it actually seems like there
+is a future for the platform in the distro.
+
+If not, the repositories will be removed after the middle of the year, along
+with packaging only relevant for these platforms (such as mesa-amber).