On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 10:07 AM CET, Marc Haber wrote: > On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote: >> Planned obsolescence is bad, not good. > > Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain. > Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is > nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and > resources. The kernel and/or toolchain dropping support is a valid argument IMO. Dropping support because 7/8/10/15 years have passed is not. Some 'random' other distro dropping support is (IMO) not a valid argument in itself. Maybe their reasons behind dropping it, is. I've also seen the argument that special casing is an effort. While ofc true, a lot if not all of that has already been done. When there's practical, not just some theoretical, evidence that it still involves an undue burden/effort, that's a valid argument. As an example, I have an Asus TF-101 with Tegra2 chip, thus no NEON support, which still works great. AFAIK the (armhf) software has already been adapted/special-cased to deal with HW which does and HW which does not support NEON. Removing that special casing is an extra effort ... for what? To deliberately drop support for HW which does not? Why? If changing the baseline to require NEON (f.e.) would speed up all the software by X%, then I would consider that a valid argument. But I have not seen that. My 0.02
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