Hmm. Did anybody measure the performance increase in a "typical" userspace-CPU-intensive program when built with i586-only options (as opposed to "optimize for i586+ but generate compatible code)?
In the current issue, it is not that much a question of performance,
but of correctness: the two versions of libstdc++ aren't mutually
binary-compatible, so Debian needs to decide whether to support i386 or compatibility with other distributions (and thus likely upcoming jdks etc) - you can't have both.
Regards, Martin
