On Tuesday, 22 October 2019 15:29 Brüns, Stefan wrote:
I have seen many complaints from a few people who request to keep SLE11/12 compatibility (but which SLE12? SP1-4, i.e. LTSS, or SP4 only?), but I am totally missing anything *constructive*. No guiding documentation, no review comments, no SRs fixing builds.
So if you want compatibility with old SLE releases, please go forward and provide the needed information.
I chose to believe it's just lack of information from your side and you are not mocking us deliberately. The reality is that I tried to fix build issues with older SLE releases or revert "cleanup" changes which broke the build. Most of the time, the response was like "No, we won't clutter our precious specfile just for compatibility with products which are long dead." (Where "long dead" often meant products still in regular support phase.) Eventually, I gave up and keep forks of packages I care about most in my home project. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one with similar experience and resolution.
One might ask if multiple people keeping forks of the same package in their home projects (and OBS having to rebuild all of them) is an acceptable price for having specfiles perfectly following the latest guidelines.
Personally, I see no reason to put extra work into releases which are out of General Support. LTSS support should be security fixes, but demanding new packages for e.g. SLE11 SP4, creating some untested Wolpertinger is IMHO unreasonable.
Personally, I find having newer versions of packages like libcap, tcpdump and other diagnostic and debugging tools available for older SLE products (including those in LTSS maintenance phase) highly beneficial for my work.
Michal Kubecek