Dropping pre-i686 from the archive

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2006 at 10:13:06AM -0500, Jeff Bailey wrote:
> One of the last issues on the ToolchainRoadmapNg spec to be resolved is
> whether or not we should keep support for older than i686 processors.
> The issue arose during BOFs at both UDU and UBZ for two main reasons:
> [...]
> 2) i486 for small / embedded systems like routers is an ideal target for
> µbuntu.

As a user of just such an embedded system with Ubuntu, my personal bias is
to preserve this compatibility.  My understanding is that we would gain the
following in exchange for abandoning support for these low-end platforms:

- Some simplicity in glibc packaging (no more libc6-i686)

- The possibility of a small performance benefit for higher-end systems,
  though this is notoriously tricky to measure and we have no useful data

Personally, being able to run Ubuntu on low-end platforms seems worth more
to me.  µbuntu doesn't exist yet, and it's not clear to me that it would be
worthwhile to rebuild the entire archive for it.

-- 
 - mdz