it's an interesting challenge to deal with a project that moves forward (and leaves behind mostly unsupported packages) -- this will be common to every project (with perhaps a very few exceptions)


it also relates to the question of open source hardware design --  once there's a "standard" that everyone likes, physical devices could probably be made quite cheaply (in huge quantity) and that "static" design would be a good thing

what about looking forward when drawing the hardware spec? -- that is, specify how the architecture is set up and make it so that we build the first devices at the very lower end of the spec (giving hopefully several orders of magnitude of "headroom" into which to grow in the future)