I wrote an RV64IMA emulator recently. I just needed a virtual CPU core that could boot linux, and RV64IMA seemed like the simplest way to do that - and I think that's more or less true.
But then I wanted to be compatible with off-the-shelf toolchains and binaries, and I found myself needing to extend the ISA profile to RV64GC. Not a huge lift, but it involved pulling in a softfloat library. That got me as far as booting Alpine linux.
And then I wanted to be able to boot Ubuntu, which needed RVA23, which was comparatively a much bigger lift, involving the vector instruction set among many other things. At this point I think I'd have been better off just emulating aarch64.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS exists and needs only RV64GC and will be supported and enhanced for many more years.
Debian has no plans to require more than RV64GC.
RVA23 is a very good thing in certain markets, but nothing forces you to support it for a personal project.
I cant see debian remaining on rv64gc later on when enough rva23 boards are purchasable
Why? It'll still run fine.
Just like Debian still runs on original x86-64-v1 from 1999, not x86-64-v3 (needs AVX2,FMA, BMI1, BMI2, LZCNT) or even x86-64-v3 (needs AVX-512).
Similarly, Debian for arm64 still requires only ARMv8.0-A from 2011 not even ARMv8.2-A (everything from A75/A55 to A78/N1/V1) let alone ARMv9-A (A710, A510, X2 and on).
Why would they do in the RISC-V world what they totally haven't done in amd64 or arm64?
No, debian requires ARMv8.0-A + FP + NEON, as those are optinal extensions (even optional in ARMv9.0-A)