On Fri, May 19, 2023 at 12:42:32PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > >If the main reason is to support non-free binaries, at least to me > >that does not seem like a very compelling reason. And people can > >always use old chroots or similar I guess?
> i386 is in a really awkward situation here, I think. Nobody is working > on it explicitly any more (AFAICS?), but its history as by far the > most common architecture means that: > * we still have a (very!) long tail of installations using it > * there are *massively* more old binaries available for it, free, > proprietary *and* locally-built FTR this includes wine, and 30 years of 32-bit Windows executables that people want to be able to run, including games. (for which inaccurate times are not going to be hugely important, in general.) And some of those games are going to require e.g. library packages for 3d acceleration that are in sync with kernel drivers (nvidia). This was ultimately what made "just use an older version in a chroot/container" untenable for Ubuntu and led to keeping i386 as a partial port. So one may not think that support for legacy, proprietary programs is a compelling reason to keep binary-compatibility on i386. But I counter that unless you care about this, there's no reason to keep i386 as an architecture *at all*. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
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