Bug#823465: dpkg: Won't run at all on i586 Pentium MMX due to illegal instruction
> My recommendation would be going to jessie[1], it has whole four years
> of support left. Anything you need from unstable can be backported.
Hopefully the downgrade path would be workable.
> After those four years you can reconsider, in the unlikely case your
> machine will be still alive.
That's harsh. The hardware is almost 20 years old, and it's been running
the same Debian install for 11 years already. I don't see 4 more years
as too unlikely.
> That's four more years than ia64 guys got. Unlike 586's half the speed
> of first-gen RasPi, ia64 machines can be pretty beefy -- new ones even
> are still being manufactured.
I'm aware yes.
> What kind of solution would you propose? We can't exactly add preinst
> guards to every single package. The only package that's depended on by
> (almost) all compiled code is libc6, but because of symbols handling
> the dependency is usually libc6 (>= 2.15) or such rather than (>=
> 2.22-7).
I was thinking more along the lines of adding some central check in dpkg
maybe, that detects the lack of i686 support and errors out on new,
incompatible packages. Discriminating packages could be as simple as a
by-passable check on the build/release date. But then this is a bit late
to implement in advance.
--
Pierre Ynard
"Une âme dans un corps, c'est comme un dessin sur une feuille de papier."
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