Validity of i686 as a release blocker

[Nathanael D. Noblet]

On Tue, 2015-08-04 at 11:12 -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Here's my perspective as an i686 Fedora user...
> 
> I have a box (2009-ish) that's in use as a file/backup server. As 
> such, I don't
> spend a lot of time futzing with it - it doesn't run rawhide, it 
> rarely runs
> the prereleases until beta or later time.  If something breaks, I'll 
> look at
> it, send some feedback, update it as necessary, and back off to a 
> working
> version.  And historically, it *hasn't* broken.
> 
> But, if it did break that hard... would I spend a month digging into 
> the
> kernel source and bisecting to try and find a fix? Or would I spend 
> the
> $100-120 to slap a new motherboard in it and install the x86_64 
> version?
> 
> I'd like to say I'd do the former. But realisitically it's the 
> latter. And I
> wonder how much of the i686 Fedora-using community is in the same 
> boat.

So we have a product that is installed on about ~80 netbooks running
i386-PAE kernels. They are now running f21 I think. I considered
updating them but they are offline machines for nearly their entire
life. I had contemplated putting CentOS 7 but there is no i386 for
that. I would imagine that the hardware would be replaced by newer
netbooks that handle x64. If they can't be they'll run EOL'd versions
of fedora till death.  If I can update them eventually it wouldn't
matter to me if the i386 system saw less love but eventually came out.
Granted if fedora dropped i386 completely I'd find a distro to use that
supported it I guess if any. It wouldn't be the end of the world for
me.

-- 
Nathanael