Re: Bug#823465: dpkg: Won't run at all on i586 Pentium MMX due to illegal instruction
(Dropping the bug report; replacing with CC to debian-devel)
Adam Borowski writes ("Bug#823465: dpkg: Won't run at all on i586 Pentium MMX due to illegal instruction"):
> I'm afraid there's not enough people who care about 586 enough to maintain
> it. And the bad decision of i386 to stick to a single arch during its whole
> life makes it hard to do so on debian-ports. Compare with ARM: there's arm
> armel armhf arm64 arm32(arm64ilp32) -- it frequently refreshes the ABI to
> make use of new CPU features, which also makes it easy to keep old compat
> without forcing new processors to stay with the lowest common denominator.
Now that we have multiarch it might be possible to use it to solve
this problem. Suppose we arranged for everything to build
"Architecture: i686" or something, and provided a mapping table to
teach dependency resolvers that "any Architecture: i386 package
satisfies dependencies of Architecture: i686 packages". Or some
scheme along these lines.
But ... I think it's up to people who care about retaining support for
old instruction sets to develop and propose such an arrangement. And
it would only be worthwhile if there would be effort to make d-ports
contain "Architecture: i586" (or i386 or something).
I'm definitely a fan of keeping old hardware working but I certainly
don't have effort for fixing compiler bugs in code generators for
ancient sub-architectures or whatever. I wish those who do have such
effort the best of luck.
> My recommendation would be going to jessie[1], it has whole four years of
> support left. Anything you need from unstable can be backported. After
> those four years you can reconsider, in the unlikely case your machine
> will be still alive.
This is very good advice.
Ian.
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