John Plocher wrote:
> +1 on the proposal as-is; I don't want this side discussion to derail
> the case, but...
>
> In the unlikely event that anyone is impacted by this,
> A) is the source for the driver(s) open/available for other
> distros/individuals to put it back, -or-
>
Yes.
> B) are the driver binaries available in a repo so that they could be
> re-installed?
>
No.
> Maybe what I'm asking is whether we need to remove the driver source
> from our source tree (like this proposal implies), or if it would be
> sufficient to simply remove the packages from the core system
> definition so they are not installed/used by default. Or move the
>
IMO, leaving uncompiled/untested source in the tree for ON is harmful,
in various ways. It implies (to readers) a level of support that does
not exist, and the source becomes vulnerable to bit rot.
In this particular case, I also intend to remove more than just the
drivers -- but also the associated support in devfsadm, the device
allocation framework, bfu, etc. I hope the Xorg folks will also nuke
the driver for X11 from their tree as well, since they haven't tested it.
> source (et al) to the contrib (or obsolete or ...) repo? Or...?
>
> Given the age and systems characteristics of bus mice, this may be a
> poor test case (and if so, that's OK by me), but, in general, it seems
> to me that combining "removing old hardware support" and "open source
> OS used by a long tail of different hardware users" is somewhat of a
> mismatch. What if your assertion of "not used" is wrong? Can a
> person affected by the removal /do/ anything about it?
>
Sure, they can. Frankly, if it affects someone enough to care, and they
can supply test cases, we can always revive the support. Or they can
compile the sources themselves. The stuff *does* live in the hg
history, after all!
In this particular case, I really *do* think that nobody is likely to be
using those particular devices with OpenSolaris (or even Solaris
itself). Unlike NetBSD, OpenSolaris doesn't have a history of
targetting ancient "nostalgia" devices. Folks that want to continue to
use ancient hardware are probably far better served by NetBSD, which
continues to be usable on systems such as Sun-2 and Sun-3 hardware.
For the most part, systems with such hardware will already have problems
finding support for functional disk drives, I suspect. (Did Solaris
ever support MFM drives? I don't think we have any ISA SCSI
support...) This is i386 (and really i286) legacy stuff here, not stuff
found on systems built in the last 15 years.
-- Garrett
> -John
>
>
>> Garrett D'Amore - sun microsystems wrote:
>>
>>> We'd like to EOF these drivers from Solaris Nevada. We don't believe this
>>> will have any negative impact on anyone -- the only impact should be the
>>> positive result of removing the driver binaries, man pages, and associated
>>> source code.
>>>
