Yesterday, a General Resolution was proposed to decide if the new amd64 architecture is added to the list of supported architectures in Debian 3.1. After reading the thread (and before reading it, anyway), I can't agree more with joeyh's post on the matter: if Debian as a group can't decide about things like this in a civilised discussion in the debian-devel mailing list, it probably means we're fucked. Not so long ago, proposing GR's was an exception, something we got to when reaching a reasonable consensus was completely impossible, and never for strictly technical issues like this one. We do need to vote major political issues like wiping non-free from the archive, or ammendments to the Constitution or whatever, but voting what architectures we're going to support in Sarge is wrong.

Sure, it would be very nice to have amd64 in Sarge, but how positive are the porters that this wouldn't mean yet another delay for our release? How widely tested is the port, given it hasn't entered unstable officially? I'm all for it's inclusion in unstable as soon as our infrastructure can deal with it, but making it mandatory to ship with sarge seems too dangerous to me. Besides, there are alternatives. There are no precedents, but how crackful would it be to add the port to Sarge after it is released, say in 3.1r1 or r2? Why don't we, instead of complaining that not including it would make us not support in the next 2 years an architecture that will soon become more and more popular, commit to doing more frequent releases, so this is a not-so-big issue anyway?

As joeyh and others said, I really hope things change in the future, this situation makes Debian less and less interesting.