>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?
And I think that Charles underestimates the effort needed to resurrect
that pipe of code ripped out 3 years ago.
>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.
Quite: a few things could be easy to keep support for such as device
drivers which were dropped because of changed interfaces and lack
of interest in maintaining them, even Ultra-1 support for those who
feel that they are happy to run the risk of 64 bit on UltraSPARC-I.
>> 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.
Solaris went open at build 19 or of *Nevada*; sun4m was dropped at
build 22 of *Solaris 10*; that's three years of bit rot and, to summarize
the others before me:
- no dtrace support
- no Compare and Swap hardware (therefor can't run much of the
code in S10 32 bit libraries)
- no 32 bit specific crypto
- no support for privileges in sun4m specific bits
- we ripped out support for 32 bit kernels at a later date
too.
It's a resurrection of biblical proportions.
Casper
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