Dropping i386 non-PAE as a supported kernel flavour in Precise Pangolin

[John Arbash Meinel]

...

>> Computers are replaced as frequently as refrigerators by people who don't
>> care how quickly it loads a page or makes ice: when it stops turning on.
>
> Those people are probably not upgrading their refrigerator firmware
> all that often either.  They may not want a major new OS release.
> They might install an update/backport of a particular app.
>
> There is a group of people who want the latest-and-greatest software
> on old or small hardware, but they're necessarily the crowd you're
> describing here.
>
> m
>

I think you mean 'not necessarily'. I agree, though I know we dealt with 
a lot of this in our 'bzr python-compatibility' discussions. In that 
particular case it was "we don't want to upgrade the OS, or even the 
system libraries/python version, but we do want to upgrade a given 
application". Which is a different level than "we don't want to upgrade 
our hardware, but we do want to upgrade all of the OS and applications."

Certainly it is a bit different when one upgrade is $$ and the other is 
free.

Still, it seems an open question for how to handle users that want the 
latest-and-greatest X, but don't want the latest-and-greatest Y, even 
though X depends on Y.

John
=:->