Charles Monett writes: > I just dont see the point in stonewalling support unless it was > something earlier than a sun4m- reiterating the question for > purposes of clarity - what would it take to get it back into > something that would result in a usable sun4m OpenSolaris system? > There really cant be anything in those machines that is worth > putting such tremendous effort to keep undocumented and unsupported, > all swept under the closed branch.
There's a lot of work involved. First of all, as with the rest of Open Solaris, there's a ton of legal effort involved in getting the code released under CDDL. We have to do a lot of research to make sure that we have clear title to release the stuff, and that means making sure not just the software but the underlying documentation was "safe." That's pretty hard for current platforms, and gets much, much harder as you go back in time to long-forgotten platforms. Secondly, there's the problem of re-integrating, testing, and then supporting the code. For stale platforms that've fallen off the end of the service life (ones, incidentally, that can still run existing old releases just fine and that likely have rings run around them by cheaper modern hardware), who is going to put up the engineering resources -- time and money -- to do such a thing? If someone does, what less worthy project needs to be canceled or delayed to make it happen? I'm all for creating a "compiled ok last time we checked, but nobody's maintaining it" repository for deleted stuff. There are probably some small technical things to work out (e.g., keeping diffs or tags for files that changed instead of just being deleted), but I don't think that _necessarily_ means someone has to go digging up the whole graveyard to find contributions. > As for there being "better things to do than adding back support for > obsolete hardware", well, that's no justification for holding that > code back. Why it was dropped in build 23, and not picked up later > in OpenSolaris to avoid such problems such as this, is a bit of a > mystery that should never have been. Not certain what the answer is here, but one clear possibility would be "maintenance isn't free." Solaris isn't a museum. -- James Carlson, KISS Network <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
