Re: [Bug-tar] tar 1.15.1 doesn't compile on sunos 4.1.4

[Paul Eggert]

jason andrade <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sun, 5 Jun 2005, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Is this because you really need tar 1.15.1 to run on SunOS 4.1.4,
>> or simply because you're trying to help tar to become more portable?
>
> definitely the latter.  i think there's still some sunos4 users out there

I was a great champion of supporting SunOS 4.x long after many others
had given up and gone to greener operating systems.  But even I have a
tough time justifying support for it now.  It's been years since I got
a serious bug report from a real SunOS 4.x user who was trying to
build and install a GNU application on it.

I don't doubt that there are still a few SunOS 4.x boxes chugging away
somewhere (hopefully not directly connected to the Internet :-), but I
doubt whether there's a real need there any more.  The last SunOS 4.x
box that I personally had dealings with was shut off in August 2000,
and it was kept around that long only because it was connected to old
special-purpose hardware that did not have a SunOS 5.x driver (and
thus it was not a serious porting target for GNU applications even in
2000).

> i can definitely understand your point though and i'm not likely to hassle
> apart from it'd be nice if GNU projects could perhaps maintain a list of
> architectures/oses that may have been supported but no longer compile/run,
> the last version known to compile/run on that platform and i'd be
> willing to try to look after the list(s) if noone else wants to.

Be careful what you wish for!  That would be a mostly-thankless task.
The GCC and GLIBC folks attempt it, to some extent, but it's a lot of
work and the lists are often out of date.

However, if you do want to volunteer to do it, then perhaps your best
bet is to document the assumptions made by gnulib, as that is the
central repository for code shared among tar, coreutils, etc.  For
example, as I recall, it was GDB that first dropped support for
pre-C89 systems, and other GNU applications followed after that,
inspired partly by gnulib.