On Sat, Feb 08, 2025 at 04:27:44PM +0100, Paul Gevers wrote: > Hi Andrew, > > On 08-02-2025 14:29, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > > Intel/AMD 32 bit libraries will still > > be available and work for you to run legacy software but it will be a > > partial release and likely completely gone after Trixie in five years. > > Why do you think it will be completely after trixie? With my Release Team > member hat on, I hope this is not true, otherwise we would drop it *before* > trixie. > > Paul
Hi Paul, Because I'd expect the Release Team, early in Trixie time, to specify that it's very unlikely to be supported in Forky and to be dropped altogether in Duke at the latest. If Debian is going to drop support for an architecture, we've always been late to do it rather than doing it right on one release. There were discussions about whether i386 was viable in Bookworm fairly late on before the Bookworm release, for example. My guess is that by the time Trixie support is finished - after three years as it moves to LTS or as it moves to ELTS support - that still more of the released libraries for i386 won't be able to be built straightforwardly. If they weren't already being cross-built on amd64, many of them would not now be here. Anyway, that's possibly drifting off-topic for many of the readers of this list. I stand by my assertion that pure 32 bit hardware is now more or less EOL and unsupportale, though. Much more importantly, will there enough mainstream Linux support for better text to speech, screenreaders, speech input and screen magnification for Debian to continue benefitting this community? I sincerely hope so. All the very best, as ever, Andy (amaca...@debian.org)
