Re: [golang-dev] Moving Go to a newer NetBSD ABI in the 1.13 dev cycle

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

David Chase <drchase%google.com@localhost> writes:

> Is anyone still running the lower-numbered NetBSDs? 6 is not maintained,
> 7.0 was released September, 2015, 8.0 July 2018.

A fair question.

I'm sure some people are still running 6.

Many people delay upgrading across major versions, and last July is
really pretty recent.  This is a bit like people running LTS versions of
RHEL, where they only want base system security updates and avoid the
effort of major upgrades.  This is particularly apt in production
situations with strained sysadmin resources, where people sometimes
upgrade every other branch.

So running 7 is pretty common, and it's not yet out of line even a
little bit.  I myself have a 7 system, even though most are 8, and I
don't yet feel bad about that.

> I lean in favor of the change, 1.13 occurs about a year after 8.0's
> release, what has the adoption been like?

I think it's reasonable to desupport 6 as of about now.  It's been out
of security maintenance for 8 months.

I would say that more people have upgraded to 8 than are still on 7.  I
would even guess it's 75%.  But it's nowhere near 99%.

A similar question might be how many people are running Ubuntu older
than 18.04 (all earlier verisons, including LTS)?  I bet it's far from
negligible.

I have not seen an explanation of why desupporting 7 is useful for the
go world.  From the NetBSD point of view, expecting people running 8, 9
(future, no date set) and -current to have COMPAT_70 in their kernels
(perhaps via modules) seems vastly better than breaking go on all 7
systems.  The NetBSD 8 GENERIC for amd64, as an example, has compat
going back to 1.5.  While some might consider that extreme, dropping
compat for two or three releases back seems unthinkable.

Greg