I hope this is an oversight and not a releng decision. There are many people who use i586 cpu's and need a stage3 to install from. Otherwise they need to do a stage1/2 install which is no longer supported. In my opinion an x86 or i386 stage3 should be provided for these users. If not all of them, an x86, i386, i586 and an i686 stage3.
I learned today from _AxS_ that glibc-2.4 doesn't work reliably with 586 and lesser machines. If that's true then there's no point in making a 2006.1 tarball, but for a while at least they can keep using 2006.0 and glibc-2.3*. Maybe someone will patch glibc eventually, and hopefully Gentoo will pick up that patch if it works out. This is hearsay, though, I've done no research of my own :)
OK. Here's the situation. Release Engineering has built up a set of stages for x86, that we're planning on putting under "legacy". These stages are both "x86" and "i586" with CHOST set to i386 and i586, respectively. For i586, we have built against both the "default" and the "no-nptl" profiles, so you can choose which stage to build from. These will likely be the last set of stages for machines that aren't i686+ due to the changes in glibc making them harder and harder to support. We'll be announcing this in the GWN/front page/etc. as well as this bug report once they hit the mirrors. Currently, we are working out scheduling for these.
Thank you very much for the update. Great to hear we will still be supporting these playforms. BrianW
I wouldn't go so far as to say "supporting" them. I'm building a set of stages for them, but I have no intentions on actually providing support for them.
Could I talk some devs into putting WHERE_HAVE_THE_586_ISOS_GONE.TXT or something on the mirrors, with a small explanation as to the problem, or just point to this bug? People in #gentoo keep getting stuck stage 1s for their less-than-686 boxen and we can't really do anything to help them.
I've added the i586 stage3's to the mirrors.
