[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[Ben Taylor]

Thiele, Karl D (Karl) wrote:

>Folks,
>
>Oh, I need to weight in here, very much on the side of Anthony.  Well an
>ls | wc -l of /home shows me 167 solaris 8 blades, these are just in my
>group. We are one of the biggest customers of Sun. We will be moving
>most of our Suns to Solaris 10 from 8 within the next 6-12 months only
>because of hardware upgrades to production. New boxes do not support
>Solaris 8.
>
>All the developers of UNIX based applications, at this company, have now
>come to rely on Blastwave. Almost everyone runs kde. (do not send us
>back to CDE, I would have to consider finding a new job).
>
>"If it is not broke do not fix it."  So true in business. Some boxes
>that are not being replaced, will remain solaris 8.
>
>You could even freeze off adding new software for Solaris 8, but do not
>get rid of it. It is just disk space and that is cheap these days.
>  
>

I do not believe I was suggesting that Solaris 8 support be
discontinued.  My experience with Open Source software is
that there are substantially fewer "porters" of OSS to Solaris
than other platforms.  Given that, I think it's a huge waste
of time to have to jump through hoops to get new code
working on such an old OS. 

As I pointed out in another discussion, QEMU has to be
compiled on it's own version, especially if using the KQEMU
accelerator.  There are specific sets of things that go missing
or change as we go backwards from Solaris 10.  Jonathan
Wheeler is dealing with such an issue on libxine, and having
talked to those developers, they wondered why anyone would
bother with libxine on such an old platform.

Hell, blastwave doesn't even have a gcc for x86-64 that can
compile 64-bit apps.

I know Solaris 8 is out there. Hell, I know folks still on 2.4 and
2.5.1 because the developers left and they are to afraid to
move it to a newer OS despite binary compatibility.  But let's
be realistic, you cannot pay Sun (unless you are a big
customer, with a big install base of Solaris 8) to install it
anymore.