Yeah, sorry buddy, but that's just not how modern software dev works. Platforms change, code gets outdated, and whilst older platforms "work", they're likely not taking advantage of all the features that have been added to platforms since that time.

It's much easier/better when you are forced into dealing with the change. At least people can laugh at how annoyed others get when they cry "but you broke everything!".

It's called progress. Get with the times or get outdated.

GCC deprecates and removes support for target architectures and various other flags with each major release. If you care about receiving security updates for your application, you have to upgrade the compiler, and to upgrade the compiler you may have to make changes to your application and/or physical hardware. Very few of the architectures that were available 30 years ago are still supported by any maintained compiler today.

Similarly, developers are not forced to upgrade to python 3 any more than they are forced to upgrade to GCC 4, in that they can keep using their old tools but they're SOL on maintenance if they don't meet the requirements of the new versions.

So, either your team chose really well 30 years ago, is actively working on an horribly insecure application, or has invested some modicum of effort periodically over the last 30 years to maintain support with the compiler (unlike the developers complaining about Python 3's upgrade window).

Though you could have done most of the work ahead of time.