Re: Proposal: remove OSF/1 support

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 08:15:29AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I don't think people have a right to be upset that Free Software has
> bugs and that some unspecified Other People aren't fixing it for them.
> So if someone is acting that way, I'm inclined to just dismiss their
> comments entirely.

Thanks, Greg.

> More constructively, if they are upset, presumably they have an OSF/1
> machine, and they should be able to fix it themselves, or hire someone
> to fix it if they lack the skills or time and they actually care.  (If
> they don't actually care enough to try to help, and are just
> complaining, see my previous paragraph :-).
> 
> So without answering the question "What is the total number of people
> that do use pkgsrc on OSF/1 or might over the next 5 years?" to assess
> the loss of removal, I think the gain of removal is pretty much zero.
> 
> I object to doing things because of people posting unreasonable things.
> I don't really have an opinion on whether the OSF/1 situation is so bad
> that there's essentially no hope of anything useful.
> 
> If we are going to drop OSF/1 we should have a look at the entire list
> and apply the same judgement process to all.  It looks like most of the
> 90s UNIX systems are in the same boat, minus the reddit rant.

OK. I'm inclined to agree that keeping these oldschool platform
definitions provides net value to pkgsrc because someone can
potentially build on them to produce something useful, as we
recently did for UnixWare.

I have however updated the website to clarify the status of
our platform support, "user beware", basically.