On Fri, 6 May 2016 00:17:31 +0200
Adam Borowski <kilobyte@???> wrote:

> On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 05:15:56PM -0400, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > Debian is dropping suppoort for i586. It seems to mean tht the
> > i386 platform will no longer run on 586 processors, as gcc starts
> > to generate instructions that are incalid there.
> [...]
> > I don't know if we need to watch out for anything relating this in
> > Devuan. Do we plan to support and continue to support i586?
>
> Reverting this in a derivative is possible, although it lands you
> pretty much exactly in Raspbian's position.
>
> You'd need to:
> * reconfigure and rebuild kernel for -585 flavour
> * undo the not-yet-done merging of libc6-i686
> * (no source changes) rebuild every package!
> * watch out for regressions
>
> The last point can be mostly automated -- you can use the attached
> script to determine the CPU needed to execute a given binary.
>
> The result will be one-way compatibility: your packages will run on
> any Debian-compatible system but importing from Debian or any other
> external repository will require a rebuild.
>
> Not worth the effort, I'd say. Jessie still has four years of
> security support (I don't think Devuan has the manpower to provide
> security support for 40k+ packages alone after Debian ends it), and
> if you'd _still_ run that museal machine at that time, you can
> reconsider.

We need to pick our battles. I bought a Pentium II, a 686, in 1998.
That's a little over 18 years ago. The last 32 bit Pentium, the Pentium
4, stopped selling in August 2008: That's 8 years ago. And since 2004,
you could, and many people did, buy 64 bit machines. A 586 or 32 bit
machine is doubtlessly so old that getting one replacement part would
cost quite enough to just dumpsterize the computer (unless one has a
basement full of cannibalizable computers).

How many peoples' lives would we improve by taking over the i586
version?

SteveT

Steve Litt
April 2016 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21