Re: Planned obsolescence ? (was: Re: Architecture baseline for Forky)

On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 3:03 PM CET, Marc Haber wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 03:00:24PM +0100, Diederik de Haas wrote:
>>On Tue Oct 28, 2025 at 10:07 AM CET, Marc Haber wrote:
>>> On Tue, Oct 28, 2025 at 09:59:11AM +0100, Romain Dolbeau wrote:
>>>> Planned obsolescence is bad, not good.
>>>
>>> Still, Debian has to rely on stable support in kernel and toolchain.
>>> Once kernel and toolchain stop supporting¹ an architecture there is
>>> nothing that Debian could do about that with its limited personpower and
>>> resources.
>>
>>The kernel and/or toolchain dropping support is a valid argument IMO.
>>Dropping support because 7/8/10/15 years have passed is not.
>>Some 'random' other distro dropping support is (IMO) not a valid
>>argument in itself. Maybe their reasons behind dropping it, is.
>
> The problem is that Bastian has a point here in wanting to announce that 
> YEARS in advance, but toolchain/kernel usually having a much shorter 
> horzion. So, when we want to guess what they're going to do we have to 
> be really careful and err to the conservative side.

I think announcing at the beginning of a new release cycle that release
X (in this case Forky) will be the last that architecture X will be
supported, is great. Then people who are interested/invested in it have
~2 years to prepare for it.

When it comes to kernel support, I'm quite sure Arnd Bergmann announces
dropping support for (device) X *years* in advance, so that does NOT
happen overnight. (With their spring/autumn announcement/summary IIRC)

As said before, I think those are substantive arguments.

My problem is that I have mostly seen imaginary or theoretical
arguments. I would be fine with an argument where I think "that makes
sense" (even though I may not be happy about it). Just arbitrary amount
of years have passed or "people should not be using that anymore". 
To which my response is: "Why not? If it still works?"

Cheers,
  Diederik

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