Si vous avez un peu suivi les péripéties du PowerPC sous Ubuntu sur ce blog, vous savez que l'abandon du support officiel de l'architecture PowerPC par ubuntu est dans l'air depuis quelques temps. C'est désormais officiel...

C'est Matt Zimmerman qui l'annonce ici, (en même temps que la non-activation par défaut des drivers Nvidia dans Feisty Fawn, et c'est tant mieux!).

Pour éviter tout mauvaise interprétation de ma part, voila le texte in-extenso de l'annonce:

The PowerPC Architecture

Summary:

Beginning with Ubuntu 7.04, the PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team.

Full decision:

The Ubuntu Technical Board has decided to reclassify PowerPC as an unofficial architecture, rather than a fully supported architecture, for Ubuntu 7.04 and subsequent releases. This means that packages and ISO images will continue to be produced, but releases will not be delayed due to problems which are specific to PowerPC, and the quality of the PowerPC release itself will depend very much on the extent to which members of the Ubuntu community drive PowerPC testing and bug fixes.

The rationale for this decision has been recorded in the PowerPC Review document at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCReview, which was derived from a discussion at our developer summit in November. The conversation has continued, and for some time we have pursued a number of sources for funding to continue the official testing and support for the architecture. Unfortunately those resources have not been obtained, and we can not make the necessary commitments to continue official support for this architecture.

A team of PowerPC users and developers has been formed at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-powerpc and will be the focus of efforts to keep Ubuntu's PowerPC support at high quality. We welcome wider participation in that team, and if developers devote some additional time to the work then there is no reason that Ubuntu on PowerPC should not continue to deliver high quality releases.

It is possible that PowerPC will once again become a fully supported architecture in the future, if the resources needed to guarantee its quality are found. The architecture is certainly gaining large numbers of users in embedded and console devices, and there are many reasons to continue to work with the platform. These uses are outside of the core Ubuntu mandate, however, so resources cannot be diverted from our server and desktop efforts just to address their needs.

Existing Ubuntu PowerPC releases will continue to be maintained for the duration of their supported life cycles, including Ubuntu 6.06 LTS which will be supported on PowerPC servers until 2011.

rien de vraiment nouveau par rapport a ce que j'annonçais plus tôt, donc, j'ai la flemme de traduire... surtout que c'est quand même pas de l'anglais incompréhensible! Bon, si je trouve le courage, j'éditerais ce billet.