linux supporting old/legacy hardware & software

[mocore]

happened to read this @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34784416

I wanted to rebuild Debian 2.2 against GCC 3.3 with its better support for SMP and SSE support for an old Pentium 3 workstation I've been playing with. Back then that kind of optimization could yield impressive performance benefits

Unfortunately there's just no documentation for how to rebuild those ancient versions of Debian.

&

Gentoo still supports i486 architecture and it's totally ready to tweak build flags.

Gentoo also has a ton of historical rot, something users have been trying to solve for a while https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712

"Old" or "historical" Gentoo distfiles mirror - https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712

why reminds me of lamenting the loss of  *.x/src  from tcl 1.x,2.x,3.x

perhaps in the above is an argument for reinstating  ./src from the removed/archived repository's ?

interesting to hear about challenges of old hardware & software support form the perspective of other distros