Rob Lanphier wrote: > > It's entirely reasonable for us to drop support for older desktop > distros. Since desktop Linux (the platform, not just our Linux viewer) > is in a seemingly perpetual beta, and that distros are pretty much > designed to be upgraded free of charge, it doesn't make as much sense to > support old versions. If there were some statistics that seem accurate > enough to back up the case that virtually no one is still running Ubuntu > 6.06 that expects to run Second Life, that'd pretty much seal the deal > from a business perspective. > > However, there's also a logistical hurdle that we also have to get over. > I'm going to guess that some of this is driven by the fact that we run > Debian Etch on our server infrastructure, and that our build farms and > common libraries (e.g. the ones we package up and provide, as well as > use ourselves) are tuned for supporting them. I don't know for sure if > this is at the heart of the issue, but it's a reason I've at least heard > before. So, I'm going to let other Lindens on this list speak up about it.
Debian etch was getting increasingly difficult to build the viewer with its shared libraries. Before lenny came out i was having to back port increasing numbers of packages to keep my etch buildings running. There is also the mesa bug of etch that causes crashes with the viewers built on that platform. As you are using Debian for the servers, i will continue with that Distro for my viewer discussion and because Debian has focus on security and stability it is one of the slower turn around distros. Most others are updating the desktop at a much more regular interval. IMHO, its probably not worth the effort of supporting desktops older than Debian Stable. Or at least phasing out support for old-stable at some point during the life of stable. Which is about 2 years. By this i mean you would still be supporting etch now but looking to phase out this year. This would actually bring the viewer support not that far out of line with the server. Although the server OS upgrades do seem a little over cautiously behind, not that i'm recommending jumping to lenny now, but I think it would be good by say the 12 month point of stable to have a migration strategy in place from oldstable->stable and start implmenting this in the 2nd half of the stable life. So you are fully migrated before stable +1 appears. This would not be a bad time frame for viewer support as well. And in theory would give quite a long "minimum version window" Robin
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
