"Dr. David Kirkby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > although you are saying it is still an operating system supported by > Sun
"Support" is a relative term. If you find a new bug in SunOS 4.1.4, Sun will not fix it for you, even if you have purchased a standard software maintenance contract from Sun. I don't call that "support", even if Sun does. By my definition, Sun doesn't "support" SunOS 4.1.4 for its paying customers, and hasn't for more than two years. This is a pretty good indication that the platform is dead. > There may *real bugs* that become evident under SunOs 4.1.4, Possibly; but you haven't reported any in this thread. Instead, you've reported only bugs in SunOS 4.1.4 itself. This suggests that porting to SunOS 4.1.4 is not a particularly efficient way to discover real bugs. > once developers of development tools such as autoconf and automake > break backward compatibility, it screws it up for ALL developers, Yes. That is why the decision to drop support for SunOS 4.x was not made lightly. It was made only because there are so few real users of SunOS 4.x -- for _any_ new application -- that it was not worth anybody's time to continue to work around the bugs in SunOS 4.x. As far as I know, nobody was using SunOS 4.x for new GNU applications, and this was true well before support for SunOS 4.x was dropped from Autoconf last year. We did not purposely shut off SunOS 4.x. Instead, we wrote new code, that is portable according to POSIX 1003.2-1992 (a 10-year-old standard), which SunOS 4.x happens to break on, and for which there is no simple workaround. If you think there is a real need to support SunOS 4.x, are willing to actively maintain support for it, and can do so in such a way that doesn't adversely impact ongoing development, then we'd love to use your work to continue to maintain those museum pieces.