While I support the removal of 386 support, I absolutely and strenuously
object to going to 686. 686 isn't all that old at all (1997 IIRC), and I
use a nunber of 4/586 machines still (I have one 486 which I use for
embedded development and 3 P100 boxen which are used for various things like
CVS server, gateway/firewall, testing various things).
Judging from my random contacts with users, it's a fairly usual setup to see
a network of higher (500Mhz+) end hardware machines which sit on a LAN in
1918space and are masqueraded to the outside internet by a firewall/gateway
running Debian on a 486 or low end pentium. I believe this to be a fairly
significant proportion of our userbase and I'd oppose any move to
marginalise them like this.