On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 07:29:38AM -0500, John Goerzen wrote: Hi,
> I guess the question is: is this use case too niche for Debian to > continue supporting? I would suggest that as long as we have 32-bit > ARM, are the challenges for 32-bit x86 really worse? If I assume for a moment that the Debian LTS guys (I'm not affiliated and did not speak to anyone) continue to support at least bookworm including i386, that would give you roughly another five years of support for those i386 devices. So can we add that timeframe as well to our consideration, and ask ourselfs if there is a need for fresh Debian installations on i386 five years from now? Assuming the device from 2008 that would correspond to a lifetime of around 20 years by then. As much as I love the idea of some small device still humming along five years from now, it sounds more likely that either the device will die, or you replace it anyway with some other spare device. Yeah I know stories of forgotten systems somewhere in a corner of a room, but maybe we can stick to more common cases. If the i386 support without an installer is kept for another release, maybe that extends the support for existing installations even further. That would only add some burden for fresh installations to install bookworm first, and upgrade later on. At that point I guess we could start to talk about retro computing if it's still running on i386. :) Sven
