[csw-maintainers] dropping support for solaris 9?

[Ben Walton]

Excerpts from Jesse Reynolds's message of Sun Sep 04 19:39:49 -0400 2011:

Hi Jesse,

> Are there any stats on how widely OpenCSW is used? And what
> proportion on Solaris 9?

We don't have good mirror stats that I'm aware of.  We used to get
stats from ibiblio but after being moved into the 'high volume' area
we lost that.

> Personally, I think it makes sense to drop support for Solaris 9
> when Oracle do. But the Solaris 9 frozen package archive should
> remain online, and easy instructions given on the website of how to
> point your solaris 9 boxes at it (though with warnings that there's
> going to be no maintenance for them, other than DIY).

This is the approach we took for dropping Solaris 8.  We didn't remove
the archive (and still have no plans to do so) so that anyone wishing
to[1] can still fetch packages from it.  We'd certainly do this with
9.  There is no benefit to be gained from dropping the package archives.

Also, dropping official support does not preclude building packages
for it at need/want.  Most people will abandon 9 for builds when we
mark it unsupported, but a few packages will likely still be built for
it.  I think Peter B still builds pkgutil packages for 8.  The key is
that you, as a maintainer, are no longer bound to build for it doing
10-only packages in edge cases.

We skipped from 8 to 10 here with 0 deployments of 9 and my impression
is that the many sites did it this way.  This leads me to think that
dropping 9 will have less impact than when we dropped 8 (even a year
after EOL).  I have no numbers to back this up though.

Thanks
-Ben

[1] I recently added mutt to a legacy box for a colleague.
--
Ben Walton
Systems Programmer - CHASS
University of Toronto
C:416.407.5610 | W:416.978.4302