On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 10:04 AM, William Hubbs <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 03:18:01PM +0100, Matthias Maier wrote: >> IMHO, maintaining a sensible set of old glibc versions of the last 5 >> years makes sense, and we should try to support it: > > We have a general policy in the distro that says we only have to worry > about one year. Besides that, linux-2.6.32, which is the oldest kernel > glibc-2.20 will support was released in 2009, so I think it is > reasonable to drop the old glibc versions. >
I think a general policy like this makes sense. Nothing prevents a maintainer from keeping around stuff longer, but that should be up to them (and issues in old versions shouldn't be the responsibility of others to clean up if they are blockers - just move forward and let things break after a warning or treeclean if the problem is really serious). Manpower is limited in Gentoo in general, and there is little point in pouring a lot of it into one particular package unless you pour just as much effort into other related packages. By having a guideline of one year it gives everybody something to aim for - we keep around year-old kernels that work with year-old gcc and glibc and year-old sysvinit implementations, and so on. It also lets our users have a sense up-front of what to expect - they /might/ happen to get a bit more out of the odd package, but we're not RHEL. If somebody wants to run a "Gentoo Ancient" overlay or such, more power to them! -- Rich
