[csw-maintainers] Proposal : decommissioning desktop support for Solaris 9

[William Bonnet]

Hi,

We recently experienced many problems with the CSW X11 libs I pushed forward. Especially we had to step back because of the loss of 3D acceleration. 

After switching back to Sun's lib, i'm still in front of several problems to compile recent applications against Sun's lib on Solaris 9 (especially Mozilla's stuff). I'm afraid that we will still have this kind of problems as long as we will keep compatibility with  X11 version provided Solaris 9.

As you may know, Sun's Beijing team released recent Firefox version. These builds are Solaris 10 only. On my own i made some tests with seamonkey (it was not the latest). It needs libs update on Solaris 9, but compiles almost out of the box on Solaris 10. This situation, will not improve in the next months, and i'm pretty sure it is the same for other software stacks.

This lead me to the following proposal. I think it may be the time to think about dropping desktop support for Solaris 9. Or at least to focus on providing Solaris 10 only packages for desktop applications in recent version. 

Of course existing packages would be kept in the repository, but no longer updated. And non desktop packages are out of the scope of this proposal ! 

IMHO most of desktop users are Solaris 10 users. There are certainly a few Solaris 9 users. This mean they will have to stick to existing version (FF3, TB2, etc.). Anyways current situation, makes me uncertain about the possibility to deliver anything else than these versions... Thus, better update for Solaris 10 users, instead of keeping everyone at Solaris 9 level. 

Feedback and thoughts are welcome :)

cheers
W.