[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?

[James Lee]

On 19/09/07, 18:04:13, Ben Taylor <ben.taylor at sun.com> wrote regarding Re:
[csw-users] Why support Solaris 8 onwards?:

> >Can we get back to how Solaris 8 support affects Solaris 10?
> >The 2 reasons Ben Taylor gave being void, any others?
> >
> >
> I have never *said* stop supporting Solaris 8.    Stop putting words in
> my mouth.

"Ridiculous" and "wasted effort" followed by a series of insults to
S8 users - my apologies for confusing your words with negativeness.


> I have consistenly said "don't go to super human effort to port
> applciation to
> Solaris 8".  IE, if it doesn't compile out of the box on Solaris 8,
>  move toSolaris 9.

These advanced feature to which you refer exist in S10, so the same
support problem will exist for S9.  You have a point but it's not
specific to S8.

Due to the interdependence of software one small fork leads to a big
forking problem.  Currently overall maintainer effort is minimised by
keeping parity across the OS revs, the work is done by Sun and their
guarantee of upward compatibility.

It's interesting that is in the users' list, I'm touched by the care
you express for the effort made by maintainers on your behalf.  Make
sure you include the overall effort factor when worrying about
maintainer workload but really we need know here: how does S8 support
affects S10 users?


> Even so, there are performance enhancements that are lost
> because the SW is compiled for a 7 year old OS and 10 year old hardware.

Can you provide some detail?  The chip architectures for S8 are the
same for S9 so again it's not just a S8 problem.  Can you say why the
S10 and arch binaries in the S8 packages and the specific S10 packages
from Blastwave don't provide these benefits?




James.