On 2025-10-28 09:39 Hermann.Lauer@uni-heidelberg.de wrote:
yes - maintaining all special cases is an effort....yes, but your mileage may vary: You often have a special case where general performance measuerement didb't catch the use case....yes - that are all people involde in debian or generally in Open Source....yes, throwing out old clumsy code with special workaround for old hardware flaws is a great cleanup.
First of all: I know that it is not my place to comment on that. I am not a developer, I only use Linux system at home for some ~30 years now. But it might be interesting to read my perspective. Obviously I cannot speak for production environments and business use cases.
Please feel free to simply ignore this message if you do agree that it's NOT my place to comment here... Thank you!
If you do read on:My primary question is this: for which group of users is Debian supposed to be in the first place? If it is for the users who already have certain hardware, then keeping existing hardware supported should be one of the goals of this Linux distribution. No?
Secondly: off course it would be cleaner to through out older code that supports older hardware. But this is not the point, considering the primary question: for whom do you make Debian?
For me it comes down to the amount of effort required to keep existing hardware running. If it is very tedious and time-consuming, there will come a point in time when it is no longer feasible. Take x86-64v1 for example. Keeping it running should be relatively easy. Take other systems like Big Endian PowerPC for example, and the amount of work that is required to keep it a supported architecture is much much more.
So, the questions should be: 1) how easy or hard is it, to keep the architecture supported? 2) how many systems are still in use that require support? In that order.
(And 3) is there a Debian maintainer who still want to put effort into keeping it around.)
I come from Gentoo Linux, and when people say that it's an issue on which x86-64 version a Linux distribution should be based on, I raise an eyebrow. Naturally, because on Gentoo Linux this is NOT at all a question. But for all other Linux distributions, off course this is important. Base it on v2 and you lock out so many still very usable v1 computers. But if there is so much to gain if you were to switch for example to x86-64v2 or even v3 or v4, this IS something to consider.
If it is easy to provide multiple builds, wouldn't it be also possible to provide a very low baseline package for x86-64v1, and then for only selected packages that really benefit from it to additionally provide v2-v4? For software that doesn't gain in performance at all you wouldn't have to bother...
For POWER, specifically for my Power Mac G5, Debian is my last hope. I did try Gentoo on this machine, but for me as a user (yes, maybe an advanced user, but not a developer) I did struggle a lot on those older machines, because software itself is loosing compatibility with this architecture. (Released versions are mostly no longer tested for POWER4/5 and Big Endian, so very often patches are necessary, which take time, and more than occasionally things break, bringing the necessity to report a bug, and this would leave me constantly reporting build-issues on this specific hardware... Or it leaves me with legacy/older versions that still function. On Gentoo, a rolling release, this is tedious. Which would not the case if I used Debian/PPC32/64 as a user, because you developers and maintainers then fulfill this task.) This is not the case with x86 mostly, so even x86-32 should still work better than PPC32 or PPC64. Debian, I hear, does a great job keeping PPC32 and 64 alive, but I can only imagine how much work that is.
Still, the hardware exists and will continue to function until it breaks or I (and everybody else), though still functioning, throws it in the trash. This has something to do with planned obsolescence, but at this age (>20 years for the G5s) not so much as one might be inclined to believe.
So, Debian is NOT for enthusiasts. But if some older architecture is easy to maintain, why drop support (e.g. the x86 case)? Even for enthusiasts (like early x86-32 hardware), though not the main audience...
As for POWER8, as I understand it, there are still so many users around. This shouldn't be a discussion about clean code then... If you wanted that, you'd be better off with Apple. They constantly "clean" their code and remove support for older hardware, for no apparent other reason than their own business model. Or you are a cutting edge Linux distribution that specifically targets the latest and greatest. Arch Linux for example is only available on x86-64, but even they base their binaries still on the 20 year old baseline "v1".[1] BTW, they did /some/ benchmarking back in 2020 whether x86-64v3 brings some performance boost or not.[2]
These are just my 2¢. PLEASE feel free to simply ignore all of this. Greeting, Linux User #330250 for more than 30 years now. Please don't crucify me for not being 100% a Debian user... [1] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=302425 [2] https://rfc.archlinux.page/0002-x86-64-v3-microarchitecture/