IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

[Dagobert Michelsen]

Hi folks,

@Laurent: Please don’t post to maintainers@ and users@ at the same time as it leads to
bounces when people reply to all from users@

> Am 03.12.2014 um 23:09 schrieb Laurent Blume <laurent at opencsw.org>:
> There's another guy on IRC coming to ask for S8 binaries. I think it is more than time to remove them from the archive.
> 
> I have nothing against him, he asked nicely, But nevertheless, they must go.
> 
> At this point, they are more a liability than anything else. All the famous vulnerabilities are there, HEARTBLEED, SHELLSHOCK, POODLE, and those who've not done the headlines.
> 
> The people who come asking for them are following a pattern: they're obviously not experimented, and they clearly are not able to assess the risks, and *never* in a position to take decision.
> 
> Then, their employers follow a similar pattern: they're cheapskates, who want to get as much money as possible from obsolete systems with no investment in time nor money. They willingly put their customers are risk because of their greed.
> 
> And lastly, there's an existing alternative, there's SunFreeware, which, from a quick look, has much more recent packages.
> 
> So frankly, I think we're doing a disservice to everybody by keeping those old files online. They should be removed. If a company is motivated to revive it and provides resources for it, welcome to it. But those files as they stand are just used as an excuse to avoid doing that.

While I do understand your motivation I personally think it is wrong to remove stuff,
regardless of how old it is. I cursed the times when I looked up old stuff like firmware
and it was gone. What has proposed earlier (by Maciej IIRC) was renaming old stuff to
/UNSUPPORTED-USE-ONLY-IF-YOU-ARE-UNPROFESSIONAL/ or similar which I think is ok.
Also not depending on Solaris 8 stuff is good and rebuild or drop stuff from the Solaris 8
catalog. I vaguely remember we had a list of that some time ago but can’t find that any more,
we should link that also from http://buildfarm.opencsw.org.


Best regards

  — Dago

-- 
"You don't become great by trying to be great, you become great by wanting to do something,
and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process." - xkcd #896

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