On the future of i386 on Debian

Before we proceed, let's emphasize a few things:

• My Testing hardware is i386 simply because I have plenty of leftovers from older days. These are hosts that I can afford to see randomly break due to transitions.
• Meanwhile, my desktop has been a 64-bit for over 10 years. My laptop for a bit less. Basically, my daily activities don't depend on 32-bit hardware remaining supported.
• I fully agree that there is no sense in making a fresh install on 32-bit hardware nowadays. I therefore support Debian dropping 32-bit architectures from debian-installer.

This being said, I still think that the current approach of keeping i386 among the supported architectures, all while no longer shipping kernels, is entirely the wrong decision. What should instead be done is to keep on shipping i386 kernels for Trixie, but clearly indicate in the Trixie Release Notes that i386 is supported for the last time and thereafter fully demoted to Ports.

Lauching Debian-installer from a chroot on a USB stick?

Dear Lazy Deb,

I was wondering if it's possible to launch debian-installer from a USB stick, either by bootstrapping the netinstall ISO image from command line or by launching d-i as as a collection of binaries installed in a USB chroot that already has a basic Debian distribution installed? While launching debootstrap itself from the USB stick would be possible, I'd miss all the d-i magic to partition the laptop's own hard-disk and detect its hardware at installation time, which is why I explicitly need a way to launch a full d-i from USB. NOTE: no, the laptop's BIOS doesn't support booting via USB, otherwise this would have been already attempted.