On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 04:02:54PM +0100, Simon McVittie wrote: > On Mon, 10 Jun 2024 at 12:43:27 +0000, Stefano Rivera wrote: > > The point here is that the Debian project is not intending to support > > new hardware on the i386 architecture. The architecture is being kept > > around primarily to support running old i386 binaries. > > ... and the most appropriate answers to some technical questions are not > going to be the same for "i386 to run legacy 32-bit binaries on 64-bit > CPUs" and "i386 to run on 32-bit CPUs", so we cannot simply support > both equally. Yeah, it should be made clear that if some people want to bring back proper support for i386 hardware, they will need to make a new port. Which is of course more complicated than fixing an existing one (but at least bootstrapping it should be easier than bootstrapping some non-x86 port). > If people want a distribution to run on 32-bit x86 CPUs badly enough, > one possible route would be to start a new port (perhaps called ia32, > i386t64 or something similar) for that use-case; it would have a baseline > that is as low as its maintainers want it to be (i586?), and a 64-bit > time_t for post-2038 future-proofing. > > As far as I'm aware, nobody is yet putting effort into doing this. Also, > several important upstreams no longer consider i386 to be useful (and > especially i386-without-SSE2), so so the burden of supporting 32-bit > CPUs in modern software will fall on the downstream developers who have > chosen that their aim is to support 32-bit CPUs. I assume such software already has this status on Debian i386 (and so is either not built there or supported only by the maintainer, or maybe built with a raised baseline) so there should be no regression here, though additional packages will get the same status in the future. Similarly, we already don't build a noticeable number of packages on armel (and some of them also on armhf) when we build them on arm64. -- WBR, wRAR
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