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

[William Bonnet]

Hi

> Even **sun**(beijing) had to ship "updated libs", with its firefox!
>    
Yes, but they don't provide a full X11 stack with their Firefox, do they 
? otherwise they should also provide Solaris 9 binaries...

> Even that aside... I think this is more of a firefox-specific problem.
>    

I'm not really sure about this. It's also a Qt problem, thus a KDE 
problem.  It's also already a Xfce problem, and I'm sure soon or later 
it will be a gnome problem when you'll try to get the latest version. 
Even if some time you can patch the software to make it run under 
Solaris 9, i'm not really sure it's any longer worth the effort.

> 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.
>    

Because IMHO Solaris 9 desktop users are very few, regarding to Solaris 
10 users, because we will not remove existing packages from catalog, and 
because it takes a loooonnggg time to produce Solaris 9 packages for 
some software. I cannot remember how many hours and night i spent 
patching Xfce code and mozilla stuff to finally release only FF3.0

Today the compilation of the up to date mozilla stack under solaris 9 
reached a dead end if we don't update X11.Mozilla is not the only 
software stack which is concerned. But even if it was, it's a good 
reason to me. If we cannot provide a recent browser and mail agent, it's 
a real problem to me as a desktop user.  Especially, if our policy 
prevent us to do the upgrade and force me to use Sun's contributed build 
instead of our build.

Maybe dropping Solaris 9 support for desktop is a bit fast. We should 
take in account the number of Solaris 9 users (do we have statistics 
about this ? or is it time to make Lutefisk publicly available ?), and 
we should take in account which software can be updated under solaris 9 
or not.

Packages which are easy to update could be kept up to date according to 
the maintainer will and time, but IMHO Solaris 10 should go mainstream 
as desktop target. Actually i feel like if we were stuck with this 
version which prevent us to do some updates. So what is the worst thing ?

To provide only a very few update to everyone. This means not providing 
up to date software to the majority of desktop users (which are running 
Sol10).

or to go mainstream with Solaris 10, provide up to date packages for 
this platform, and to provide what we can for Solaris 9

BTW this would also save a lot of patching and porting effort ;)

cheers
W.