On Tue, Dec 6, 2022 at 1:43 AM Terry Barnaby <ter...@beam.ltd.uk> wrote: > > On 05/12/2022 16:00, Jarek Prokop wrote: > > > On 12/5/22 14:57, Peter Robinson wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 5, 2022 at 12:01 PM Vitaly Zaitsev via devel > <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote: > > On 05/12/2022 12:39, Terry Barnaby wrote: > > I am wondering what Fedora's policy is on depreciated old shared > libraries and particularly compat RPM's ? > > Fedora is a bleeding edge distribution. If you need old versions, you > should try CentOS or RHEL. > > Being leading edge doesn't mean those usecases aren't relevant, one is > not mutually exclusive to the other, especially when it comes to > things like FPGAs etc. > > We still have myriad of VM orchestrating solutions (libvirt, vagrant, > gnome-boxes, and probably others I forgot). > There shouldn't be a problem spinning up a graphical environment of CentOS 7, > getting EPEL and then using the tool. > > Maybe the tool would work using the `toolbox` utility using last known good > Fedora version for the tool. > That is just my wild guess however. > > This is sometimes the tax for being "too" modern. > If the vendor does not want to support Fedora, we can't be held accountable > to fully support their solution. > Does the software work? Yes? That is great! If not, well… we can't do much > without the source code under nice FOSS license, can we. > > Regards, > Jarek > > Although yes, there are things like VM's, containers etc. which we use for > old development environments all of these are, IMO, clumsy and awkward to use > and difficult to manage especially within automated build environments that > build the complete code for an embedded system with various CPU's, FPGA's, > other tools etc. > > I know Fedora is fairly bleeding edge (really too bleeding edge for our uses, > but others are too far behind), but there is obviously going to be a balance > here so that Fedora is still useful to as many people as reasonably possible, > hence the question on a policy. > > In the particular case I am talking about, libncurses*5.so, this is a fairly > common shared library used by quite a few command line tools. A lot of > external/commercial programs are built on/for Redhat7 as it is a de-facto > base Linux platform and programs built on it will likely work on many other > Linux systems. These companies are not going to build for a version of > Fedora, it changes far to fast and would require large amounts or > development/support work because of this. Some of the tools I am using were > built/shipped in Feburary 2022, so we are not talking about old tools here.
I wouldn't expect them to build for a Fedora version. I also wouldn't expect ISV software built against Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (or 8) to work on Fedora either. > My view is that compat versions of the commonly used shared libraries for > programs that are used on Redhat7 should be kept available until most people > are not producing programs for that system at least +nyears and then I guess > Redhat8 once that really becomes a core base platform that external people > use. A core list of these (there are only a few) could be kept somewhere and > when one is to be depreciated, or users see problems when Fedora is updated, > a decision on this can be then made with that info. This would keep the > Fedora system relevant for more users needs without too much work. In the > case of ncurses, it is really just putting back into the SPEC file that which > was removed for F37 plus the extra storage on mirrors for the compat RPM's. As a data point, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 does not provide ncurses-compat-libs. If you can, it would be good to ask your ISVs to provide a timeline when they will migrate off of a very old version of ncurses. josh _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
