RFC: Drop toolchain support for rtems4.8, rtems4.9 and CentOS5?

[Chris Johns]

rwas wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> * rtems4.8, rtems4.9 (All host OSes): I do not see much use in
>> keeping these. RTEMS-4.8 and 4.9 and their toolchains haven't seen
>> any activities for a long time and are de-facto dead.
>>
>> Keeping the packages, to me only means carrying around historic
>> ballast of questionable value, I'd rather get rid off, ASAP.
>
> This sort of talk makes me real nervous. Recently, in an attempt to
> reconstruct
> the bsp development for the mvme167, I found myself downloading older
> gdb, gcc,
> and rtems versions. The gdb, and gcc projects apparently see the value
> in archiving
> older versions. IMO there is at least one very valid reason for doing so.
>

I, as a long time supporter and contributor to the RTEMS project, do 
take the need for long term support of tools and other parts of RTEMS 
seriously so please be aware this is something constantly being 
considered and evaluated. I have started to collect patches and other 
information related to tool sets in the 'rtems-tools.git' repo. This is 
independent of the packaging and serves to define tools for a release 
long into the future. Please note this repo and the data contained does 
not take into consideration packaging of any form.

Ralf creates and maintains the RPM repos plus some other hosts and this 
is his work. He should be free to make decisions that serve the purpose 
of that task. I am sure a number of complexities arise over time and he, 
like all of us, have limited time to invest so things needs to be 
constrained. He may also have other reasons and that is his call.

> Your attitude seems to not only forget the past, but to eliminate any
> trace of it. I for one
> view it as data, important data. The cost of keeping it on today's very
> inexpensive harddrives
> seems well worth the potential value obtained for end users for things
> like version archeology.

I wish adding hard drives was the answer. We increase the size of 
storage in the RTEMS network and that puts extra pressure on backups, 
the size of the servers we need, and the amount of work we need to do to 
maintain the whole thing. We will always welcome donations to support 
the hardware we have so contact Joel if you wish to.

Chris