Debian dropping support for 2.4 kernels??

An anonymous reader writes: I have been a carefree user of debian-unstable for more than a decade now, upgrading sporadically and enjoying its incredible robustness. In the last year, suddenly there are issues everywhere I turn. The excessive version dependency has made untangling apt-get messes nigh-impossible (try to install mysql 4, I dare you). But it seems to have reached a new low: this bug report indicates that debian-unstable no longer runs on 2.4 kernels because of a poor decision made by the glibc team. Why has debian turned into a fragile incompatibility nightmare so quickly? Or has this been a long time coming?