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

[rwas]

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.

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.

Recently, you removed perfectly good tools from the rtems system for 
opensuse11.3. A version
of suse I was still using. I can understand dropping maintenance of the 
tools. But why you felt it
necessary to *burn the books* (so to speak) on perfectly good tools is 
beyond my reasoning.

My project uses 4.9.3 and its tools. My project has suffered many slips 
in schedule and really can't
afford the down time to convert to 4.10'ism's. When I say the project 
can't afford it, I mean any slips
put the project at risk of cancellation. That and the ~30jobs that go 
with it.

  It's still not clear to me that 4.10 for the mvme5500 is ready for 
primetime. We have been successfully
using 4.9.3 for >3yrs. It's not broke, I don't have time to fix it.

If it's a matter of disk space, let me know. I'm sure I can come up with 
a harddrive for the rtems project.

Robert W.