Hi Simon On 2023/05/19 17:30, Simon McVittie wrote:
1. same as in recent Ubuntu: just enough packages (mostly libraries) to configure it as a multiarch foreign architecture on an amd64 system, and run legacy Linux i386 binaries directly or legacy Windows i386 binaries via Wine2. same as (1), plus basic utilities (coreutils, etc.) and optionally an init system, to be able to make a pure i386 container or chroot that can run on an externally-provided amd64 kernel 3. same as (2), plus kernel, bootloader and init system to be able to: (a) construct a complete bootable installation using debootstrap or similar; (b) upgrade existing i386 installations
All of the above sounds reasonable, all those options acknowledge that we need some method to support a subset of packages for an architecture. It would be nice to see this extend to more than just 32bit x86. A while back someone from release team mentioned to me that they toyed with the idea of adding a new 32bit x86 architecture for Debian that's called i686 instead (and enable things that might not actually work on actual 32bit binary), so it would really just be for compatibility/containers/etc, and then dropping the entire i386 architecture completely. Not sure how viable that is in practice, but it sounds like a good idea.
4. user-facing media like debian-installer and Debian Live
I think we already have broad enough consensus that we don't need this. If there's enough Debian binaries to make that happen, and a user who has a niche enough use case for that, then they should have no problem just performing a local debootstrap install themselves.
-Jonathan
