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

[Philip Brown]

On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 4:56 AM, William Bonnet <william at wbonnet.net> wrote:
> .... 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.

Ah,, wow.. that's a huge proposal!

and I think a bit premature.

Even **sun**(beijing) had to ship "updated libs", with its firefox!
This up-to-date libs problem, is not going away. It has been around
since the beginning of CSW, and is even covered in our FAQ!
( http://www.opencsw.org/about/faq/, "Why dont you guys use Sun
packages of..." )

Even that aside... I think this is more of a firefox-specific problem.
firefox is a disgustingly bloated,non-portably written ... beast.
If you wished to only update firefox on sol10... I would allow those
packages through.
That being said, the majority of desktop software still compiles
relatively easily on sol9, and the other stuff with some small amount
of work (1-2 patches per piece of software).

So long as there are people willing to tackle the "needs work"
packages, I dont see why we would want to "officially" abandon sol9
desktop.

It is in fact, the area where we are most needed, in a way.
Since it is easier to compile that stuff directly on sol10, there is
less "need" for 3rd parties to provide sol10 packages of that stuff.
Sol9 users "need" us more.