On 03/27/2013 01:01 PM, Creamy wrote:
Or, more realistically, perhaps you could just choose to maintain the -patch branch of a particular version that was of interest to you. For example, if we stopped supporting 486 in 6.0, by way of example, what is to stop you taking 6.0 and maintaining a -patch branch of it for ever more, backporting any new security and other important patches? Frankly, that would probably benefit the community much more than trying to keep the main distribution working on ancient kit forever more. Please don't put too much weight on a comment which was said quite casually as a small part of a much wider discussion.
That's probably the best approach--as long as basic things such as networking protocols don't change too much, I can deal with the build-from-source-branch issue.
You can sort of see this business of deprecation creeping in, even though no broad consensus seems to be behind it. For example, the current Linux X86 kernel apparently does not support some VIA IDE controllers (IIRC, VIA 8237?), so my Via Esther thin clients won't boot using it (OpenBSD runs fine, however). So my hat's off to the community for keeping what it does keep.
--Chuck
