GCC Prepares To Drop Support For CompactRISC CR16

[skeevy420]

You suggest there will be many end users that might be affected. I bet there are none. I don't think the distros even support ancient ISAs unless they get paid to do so.

GLIBC still supports m68k, IA64, Sparc, PA and even Alpha! Plus there are a bunch of others which I have never heard of, like CSKY, or1k, NIOS2 - perhaps they are still used somewhere by someone, but nobody seems to actively maintain any of these.

I don't see the point of keeping old cruft if there is neither active development nor a large user base. It's not like they are immediately lost forever once support in latest GCC/GLIBC is removed (since anyone can build older GCC/GLIBC for many years). And at some point ISAs simply die, and the world moves on to something better.

While the old arch was the topic at hand and I'm using CR16 as the example, I was more concerned if the time frame was long enough (not just CR16, anything) since the conservative distributions haven't even picked up the version CR16 was flagged as depreciated let alone the version it was removed.

Since, anecdotally, most people using older, more esoteric hardware use older, conservative distributions, it begs to reason that those affected by something being flagged for removal or by something already removed may not be aware for another year or two after the event when they update their system.

[PerformanceExpert]

While the old arch was the topic at hand and I'm using CR16 as the example, I was more concerned if the time frame was long enough (not just CR16, anything) since the conservative distributions haven't even picked up the version CR16 was flagged as depreciated let alone the version it was removed.

Assuming the news will reach users (eg. news of many distros dropping 32-bit was widely reported, often years before it happened), doesn't this mean they effectively get another 2 years? And there is no real problem once a distro drops support for your particular system either, it'll continue to work.

So there are warnings years before, and nothing really changes after support is dropped.