[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[Dennis Clarke]

> James Dickens wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 9/16/07, *Ihsan Dogan* <ihsan at blastwave.org
>> <mailto:ihsan at blastwave.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     on 14.09.2007 23:41 Ben Taylor said the following:
>>
>>     > I, for one, do not understand why blastwave insists on supporting a
>>     > 7 year old operating system as it's base.  the amount of bad press
>>     > blastwave gets for it's bloat (especially on solaris 9, 10 and
>>     nevada
>>     > based systems) out weighs it's usefulness to the marginal fringe who
>>     > insist on staying on Solaris 8.  Solaris 8 is dead for intensive
>>     purposes.
>>     > Yeah, there are folks running Win 3.1 and Win 95 and Win98 and
>>     Solaris
>>     > 2.5.1, 2.6 and 7.  so what.
>>
>>     It's true that nobody is installing Solaris 8 anymore, but it's still
>>     widely used and they are not going to be replaced that quickly. I
>>     don't
>>     see any reason, why we should drop the support for Solaris 8
>>
>>
>> sorry lots of people are still installing Solaris 8, we are deploying
>> 4 new database servers running oracle, all are running Solaris 8. On
>> large servers I think the number of Solaris 8 instances are growing
>> still...
>
> You can't even put Solaris 8 on a new large server.  Who are you kidding?

  I can install Solaris 8 into a V490 just fine.

  I can install Solaris 8 into most anything with an UltraSparc III and
there are a ton of people out there that want that.

> You have to have the latest version of Solaris 9 just to run USIV+ systems.
> Niagara based platforms and the new M series have to be Solaris 10 minimum.

  Yep, but they won't have real market penetration for years, if ever.

  The Niagra T2 on the other hand may be a real killer of a machine.


  but that is not the point ... the Solaris 8 user base is not going away
for a while yet and that may be the fault of Sun.  Just stop shipping
patches.

> Yes, you may have an installed base, and have a bunch of folks maintaining
> the status quo.  This is typical entropic risk advoidance.  There's not
> enough folks (and probably equipment) to baseline the apps on a newer OS, so
> no-one wants to change.  And I understand that some ISV's have been very
> slow about Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 certification, so that causes some folks
> to be limited.  But Oracle?

Well, the real issue here is should we bother, and by "we" I mean you and I
and a few other guys, bother at all to waste another minute of our lives
doing software work on Solaris 8 ?

I don't want to.

Here is what I am running right now :

-bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS aequitas 5.11 snv_69 i86pc i386 i86pc

That is pretty far from Solaris 8.  I would like to work with Studio 12 also
but I think I trust Studio 11 a bit more right now.

Dennis