Promoting i386 version over x86_64?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Josephine Tannhäuser
<josephine.tannhauser at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 2009/11/18, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>> I noticed that http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora appears to be
>> strongly promoting i386 Fedora over x86_64. Is this intentional or an
>> oversight?
> I think this is a script which reads your currently used architecture
> and provide a dl link. please insert a x86_64 livecd and try it again!

As others have pointed out: this is not so and probably can't produce
reasonable results.

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 1:55 AM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik at pobox.com> wrote:
> However, if you just want a single "download now" button, 32-bit would get
> you the widest hardware coverage.

Absolutely.  Although it was my understanding that the stated goal was to
encourage everyone on capable hardware to run x86_64, and previous
editions of the download page did seem to do that.

I don't personally have much of a horse in that race beyond the fact that I
argued against dropping support for some older systems in the 32 bit build
based on the position that users on new hardware should be running x86_64.

There is obviously a trade-off in having the simplest possible install vs
getting people the best platform support. Considering the complexity of
the overall install I think the extra work to select an architecture at
download time would be a comparatively small hurdle.

In any case— the trade-off here should be consciously chosen and not the
result of an oversight in the development of the download page.
(Which I think think is generally quite good).