On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 09:03:22AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: >On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 11:41:32PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote: >> Hey John, >> >> John Goarzen wrote: >> >On Tue, Feb 04 2020, Steve McIntyre wrote: >> > >> >The thing that we have to remember is that an operating system is a >> >platform for running software. This problem is rather thorny, because: >> > >> >1) Some software is provided in only binary form and cannot be >> >recompiled >> >> Oh, absolutely. In that situation there's not a lot we can sensibly >> do, modulo telling people to run such things in a time-shifted VM. I'm >> more worried about making *our* software work in the future. > >This feels like a waste of effort, then. The only reason why people want >to run i386 is "multiarch, because I have this old binary that won't go >away". For all other stuff, there's amd64. Especially since RHEL doesn't >even do i386 anymore these days, so ISVs will have to compile for amd64 >if they want it to work on whatever their customers run. > >In my opinion, there are really only two viable options: > >- Throw away the i386 port, and tell people that we no longer support > it; >- Figure out a way for 32-bit binary-only programs to keep working when > they touch a time_t beyond 2038.
Right, that's it for our existing i386 port then. But we do have other 32-bit ports with different ecosystems and requirements - hence why I started this thread. -- Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. st...@einval.com "War does not determine who is right - only who is left." -- Bertrand Russell
