Simon McVittie dijo [Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 11:19:30AM +0100]: > Obviously that's quite a bit of churn, mostly in packages that, in > practice, have never been useful to run on the 2009-2010 plug computers > that seem to be the main use-case for armel. > > Is armel a realistic candidate for being a Debian 12 release > architecture? It's already lacking other important packages like Firefox, > and if it ceased to be treated as a release architecture very soon, > then we wouldn't have to do all this work to coax GNOME into testing > despite armel.
While I would never attempt to run a heavy desktop under such machines, I think there are still many users of Debian in armel machines -- me included! The Raspberry Pi families for models 0 and 1 are almost-but-not-quite-armhf (so they must run armel). There are several million such devices Out There™; while the RPi1 family does not make too much sense for buying nowadays (being at the same price as RPi3, which is vastly more powerful), hardware availability for the much smaller RPi0W (introduced in 2015/2017, according to Wikipedia) is much more than of the newer RPI0W-2 (oh, the naming for such machines...) I cannot provide hard numbers (I suppose mirror operators might?), but I do not feel armel systems are hard to come by, nor marginal in the amount of users they have. Yes, running a GNOME desktop on them might be a Very Bad Idea (if at all possible)... But they are very good non-interactive purposes.
