Re: Retirement of Ruby 1.8.7

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2015-02-27 at 14:06 GMT, Greg Troxel wrote:

> Generally, EOL upstream is not enough to decide to remove something.
> 
> It's a balance of the pain of keeping it vs usefulness to the set of
> pkgsrc-using people, and depends on whether people still using it can be
> basically told (fairly) that they are deliquent for not having updated.

Right, I'd rather we err on the side of keeping things unless the cost
is simply too high.  If the cost of keeping something is minimal we
should keep it.  By definition EOL'd software doesn't have updates, so
we're only really talking infrastructure changes and bulk build costs.

The first usually forces good engineering, and the second can be
worked around easily if people are on limited hardware by adding the
packages to their NOT_FOR_BULK_PLATFORM lists.

Half of the software in pkgsrc is EOL, and many of the platforms we
support were EOL years ago, but that's precisely what we're good at -
providing software in situations where there are no alternatives.  We
shouldn't lose that competitive advantage.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com