Debian has already started compiling it, and even more will be by the time this new incompatible ISA would hit the shelves.
The time to 'get it right' has already passed IMO. If a hard ISA compatibility break happens at this stage, who is going to trust that it won't happen again?
Can’t Debian just recompile it? I think that was OPs point. We’re not at a place yet where _only_ binaries are floating around we have all the source code for these applications.
Reading through this thread, I think that if the conclusion is to disallow misaligned 16-bit instructions, then not much has to happen.You technically only need to relink the programs to fix that issue.
The question is really about how far do they want to go beyond just disallowing page-crossing / cacheline-crossing instructions.
Personally, I always thought the C extension would have been much easier to implement if it had certain rules about it. Imagine looking at a random location in memory, how can you tell where instructions begin and end? You can't.
The time to 'get it right' has already passed IMO. If a hard ISA compatibility break happens at this stage, who is going to trust that it won't happen again?