Because that's 15 years and Debian's purpose is not to enable retrocomputing projects.Huh? What is Debian's purpose then? It even boasts about its broad hw support on the "Reasons to use Debian" page.[1]
Besides, the armhf baseline of armv7-a+fp aligns with the Cortex-A8 from 2005[2]. I highly doubt that archaic architecture has a lot of users besides SBCs up to the generation of RPi 2 and legacy embedded systems that are likely EOL too. Especially since aarch64 came in 2012 with armv8-a on the Cortex-A53/A57[3][4].
POWER8 went EOSL in 10/2024[5] (only a year ago, which in my books is far away from being a "retrocomputing" platform btw), plus POWER9 systems will reach the end of standard service on 31st Jan 2026[6], so by the time Forky is around in 2027 POWER9 will be obsolete too. Considering that, it's reasonable to ask for POWER8 to be supported beyond 2028, or in a more radical manner, move the baseline to POWER10 instead.
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I take issue with that, as this approach does neither reflect on the actual user base nor the shelf life of a given architecture. There is the risk you kill off a platform too early when it still has an active user base. It only works in regards to POWER8/POWER9 because those have a 10 year span from release to EOL. Rather than "release + 15 years" I feel like it should be "EOL + X years", though there should be debate on what that "X years" may be.As a general guidance I would like to aim for a ten to 15 years support range at release time.
---That's just my personal take on this as someone who is not involved in active development but likes to keep tabs on what's happening. From the perspective of a systems administrator, I'm not really fond of the idea of having to switch to a different OS because the platform is killed off on the basis of an arbitrary time frame.
Cheers, JD [1]: https://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian.en.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A8 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A53 [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A57 [5]: https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/ibm-power8-end-of-service[6]: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/announcements/services-withdrawal-discontinuance-service-select-power-systems-products-replacements-available
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