[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[Trygve Laugstøl]

Ben Taylor wrote:
> 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. 

This is the strategy I would like to see Blastwave use.

I think that a more balanced view of effort vs number and quality of 
packages would be nice. If it works on Solaris 8, great, but if it 
doesn't and it is a pain to get going, drop it. Make sure to have a bug 
reporting system where you can see how many people request supporting it 
on an older version too!

[snip]

--
Trygve