[csw-maintainers] Completely drop Solaris8?

[Roger Håkansson]

On 2010-03-18 20:55, Ihsan Dogan wrote:
>
> I thought we support the current Solaris version -2.
>


If Sun had followed their old release scheme with a release every year 
or not more than two apart, that generic statement would have been fine. 
But now Solaris 10 have been out for 5 years without 11 even having a 
public release date yet.
Speculation says around summer this year, but given that it has been "on 
the way" for tree years now I wouldn't take that seriously until I start 
seeing some traces in Sunsolve just like ahead of prior releases.

The big "mistake" (depends on how you look at it) Sun did was to release 
u6 instead of calling it Solaris 11 (but thats because of their new 
release schedule which states that a release should be in GA at least 
for 4 years and 6 months).
So now you have a ton of proprietary software officially supporting 
Solaris 10, but when you check, you really need Solaris 10 u6 or higher 
and to get there you can't just patch your way up, you need to do an 
upgrade.


For us, it means that we have to support a OS that is 10 years old, 
which doesn't have C99 support and so on.

My view is that we should follow the official support schedule and 
support a OS release until end of "Phase 1 retirement" (which means full 
support, but no sales) which is two years after last ship date. When a 
relase ends up in "Phase 2" you can no longer get any patches only 
support to solve problems.
Right now Solaris 8 have been in Phase 2 since beginning of April last 
year and Solaris 9 Phase 1 ends October 2011. By that time every company 
will have upgraded almost every system and the only ones lagging behind 
are systems that run some funky SW or have old HW-drivers. Such systems 
rarely change and don't think any of them are running pkgutil/pkg-get to 
update their SW.
When it comes to people running Solaris at home, if they haven't moved 
from Solaris 9 by that time, its because of old HW and they can't be 
many that still are running SS4/5/20 when there have been plenty of 
U5/U10 in dumpsters for years now...


What we should do is set a date when we drop Solaris 8 (and another for 
Solaris 9, no reason for not doing so right now) which shouldn't be too 
far into the future (I would say before the summer).

And regarding "first getting a stable out", I can't see why the two 
issues should have anything to do with each other. Getting a stable out 
is a high priority, but that's for people running current OS releases 
wishing to have a little less moving target when it comes to updates and 
inter-package problems. The eventual drop of support for Solaris 8 will 
mean that the current stable is the last stable for Solaris 8 and thats 
it. If they wish to keep running such old OS, they will have to cope 
with the fact that the SW also will be old.

I fear that if we are to wait for a stable then we might still be having 
this conversation in a year...