[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[Dennis Clarke]

> 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.

  Excellent !

  Because lots of people *will* pay to have it installed these days.

  Dennis