On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 2:12 AM, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
From experience with various older systems- SPARC, PPC Mac and so on- I
suspect that Lenny is a bit of a "sweet spot" after which the number of
feasible platforms will drop rapidly.
For the ARM platforms Debian has increased support since lenny AFAICT.
PowerPC is still supported in jessie.
We have had to drop alpha, hppa, ia64 and sparc due to lack of people
caring about these architectures. They could easily be revived if
someone did though, especially because of the bootstrap and
cross-compiler work being done by ARM people. SPARC is more likely to
get a sparc64 port but even that didn't get worked on enough for
jessie.
https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64
Multiarch obviously introduces its own problems.
Could you provide some examples? Multiarch seems unrelated to the
portability of Debian. In fact I think it has a more positive impact
on portability, since for less portable software you can workaround
that by installing binaries from another architecture and running them
directly where possible or use qemu-user to emulate them where not
possible.