alt Hacker NewsMuch of that information has to do with creating a new hardware port from scratch. The i386 support just needs to be "demoted" to the Debian ports infrastructure once it's officially scheduled to get dropped from the main Debian repository (which could well happen starting either in Debian forky or duke), and this can probably be done with some special handling.
(Answering the "to what end?" question, a lot of 32bit-only hardware is still available and dirt cheap in the second-hand market (e.g. early "netbooks"), much of it quite well-built and enjoyable to use. While such hardware can no longer realistically browse the "modern" web, it can still find a lot of use for more lightweight tasks, including acting as a "thin client" for more powerful machines.)
Well, the existing i386 port is going to remain as-is for supporting old software (especially games) (but the CPU baseline will likely get increased), it isn't going to be removed, so you would need a new architecture for 32bit-only hardware.
Since i386 is not going to do the 2038 transition either (since that would break the ABI), also you would need to either make a new ABI for the new port, or do the 2038 transition for it too.
Over time more and more 32-bit bugs will get introduced, so there will be lots of maintenance work to do too.