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Re: Suggestions about i386 support



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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