Re: RHEL 6 reached the end of production phase 1 on May 10, 2016

[Jeff Morriss <jeff.morriss.ws () gmail com>]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 9:36 AM, Christopher Maynard <
Christopher.Maynard () igt com> wrote:

> I don't recall what support policy, if any, was decided regarding the
> various distributions, but I believe at least one commit
> (https://code.wireshark.org/review/#/c/14041/) was reverted due to the
> adverse affect of breaking Wireshark builds on RHEL6.
>
> Now that RHEL6 has reached the end of production phase 1[1], I don't know
> if
> we want to move forward with that patch (or other patches?).  I don't
> follow
> other distributions that closely and don't know what versions of the
> various
> packages they supply, so while I think it would be reasonable to no longer
> worry about supporting RHEL6, perhaps there are other distributions that
> would be the new bottleneck?

Actually it appears that change was not reverted.  RHEL 6 (and, from what
Anders was telling me, SLES 11) users must now manually install autoconf if
they want to build from git or otherwise need to run autoconf/automake.

At Sharkfest I updated our upstream tracking page:

https://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Support_library_version_tracking

to indicate the release and EOS dates for both RHEL and SLES--but in the
case of the former I used the end of production phase 3 dates (which seems
a more realistic measure of when one can reasonably expect people to
actually stop using the release).

It's not a written policy but in general I've tried to look at/question the
cost-benefit analysis whenever we risk losing a large class of users like
those on RHEL or SLES.  I'd hate to lose/annoy the users--or force them to
run Wireshark on Windows. ;-)  I think a general policy of not losing a
class of users without good cause is a reasonable one.

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