Rainer Orth wrote:
> Garrett D'Amore writes:
>
>
>> Its "closed" meaning I didn't expect this to be controversial at all.
>> Why do you believe that this case is controversial? (If you're
>>
>
> *This* case isn't too controversial, although I happen to have both SBus
> machines and one of those cards, so I'm affected, but it isn't really bad.
>
>
>> referring to PSARC 2009/572, that *was* run as closed, and I happen to
>> share your sentiment.)
>>
>
> Indeed I was, and I consider this to be a slap in the community's face: it
> is well known that some non-Sun distributions added my hack to re-enable
> UltraSPARC I support, and I have a sponsor to have it added back to
> Nevada. So there is considerable community interest, and this is being
> sneaked in like this ;-( Not what I consider proper procedure.
>
As I said, I share your sentiment. The decision here was made by Sun
management for business reasons. (Ultimately it comes down to long term
support issues. If we don't remove support at this point, we'll
probably have to keep support going for at least 5 - 10 years *further*,
and the problem becomes one of continuing availability of equipment for
support.)
Its also the case that many of these systems have framebuffers in them
that we cannot continue to support -- there isn't funding to transition
the Xsun stuff to Xorg, and the Xsun baggage is holding back new
development. (Although one could have imagined that at least *some* of
the systems in the field could be supported if they have one of the few
remaining supported SPARC graphics cards -- I think the XVR-100 is one
such.)
I've been contemplating setting up a community repo that could
reintegrate some of the platform support that is being removed from ON
proper, into a separate "legacy" consolidation, that would not be
supported by Sun.
Does this sound like something you'd be interested in helping out on?
If it is, perhaps the community can come together to solve the problem
here going forward.
- Garrett
