Re: Architecture baseline for Forky

> Because that's 15 years and Debian's purpose is not to enable 
> retrocomputing projects.
Huh? What is Debian's purpose then? It even boasts about its broad hw 
support on the "Reasons to use Debian" page.[1]

Besides, the armhf baseline of armv7-a+fp aligns with the Cortex-A8 from 
2005[2]. I highly doubt that archaic architecture has a lot of users 
besides SBCs up to the generation of RPi 2 and legacy embedded systems 
that are likely EOL too. Especially since aarch64 came in 2012 with 
armv8-a on the Cortex-A53/A57[3][4].

POWER8 went EOSL in 10/2024[5] (only a year ago, which in my books is 
far away from being a "retrocomputing" platform btw), plus POWER9 
systems will reach the end of standard service on 31st Jan 2026[6], so 
by the time Forky is around in 2027 POWER9 will be obsolete 
too. Considering that, it's reasonable to ask for POWER8 to be supported 
beyond 2028, or in a more radical manner, move the baseline to POWER10 
instead.

---

> As a general guidance I would like to aim for a ten to 15 years support range
> at release time.
I take issue with that, as this approach does neither reflect on the 
actual user base nor the shelf life of a given architecture. There is 
the risk you kill off a platform too early when it still has an active 
user base. It only works in regards to POWER8/POWER9 because those have 
a 10 year span from release to EOL. Rather than "release + 15 years" I 
feel like it should be "EOL + X years", though there should be debate on 
what that "X years" may be.

---

That's just my personal take on this as someone who is not involved in 
active development but likes to keep tabs on what's happening. From the 
perspective of a systems administrator, I'm not really fond of the idea 
of having to switch to a different OS because the platform is killed off 
on the basis of an arbitrary time frame.

Cheers, JD

[1]: https://www.debian.org/intro/why_debian.en.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A8
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A53
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Cortex-A57
[5]: https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/ibm-power8-end-of-service
[6]: 
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/announcements/services-withdrawal-discontinuance-service-select-power-systems-products-replacements-available