Steve Langasek wrote:
>
>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.
ACK!
>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*.
That's exactly my reasoning, yup!
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com
< sladen> I actually stayed in a hotel and arrived to find a post-it
note stuck to the mini-bar saying "Paul: This fridge and
fittings are the correct way around and do not need altering"
