[Xastir] Maintaining Xastir compatibility on "obsolete" systems

[Dj Merrill]

My half cents, fwiw, is that if the OS is no longer supported, it is 
fair game for Xastir not to support it either.

You could keep an archived version of the current codebase if someone 
truly wants to run on an old machine, with the understanding that it 
won't be maintained.

Xastir runs fine on a Raspberry Pi 4, which probably costs less than the 
electricity to power some of those old systems for a year.

-Dj


On 2/19/23 10:03, Tom Russo wrote:
> At least a long time ago, one of Xastir's selling points was that it built and
> ran on just about any Unix-like operating system.  We had users with really
> old systems like Sun Solaris and so forth, and Linux was just one of many.
>
> At this point, those systems might legitimately be considered "retrocomputing".
>
> The problems recently brought up with new versions of autoconf
> (see https://github.com/Xastir/Xastir/issues/202) make it important to have
> a discussion of how important this "support old systems" aspect of Xastir
> remains.
>
> If the user base feels it is no longer at all relevant, then the solution
> to GNU software that rapidly marks old things as "obsolete" is just to
> go with the flow and make Xastir track modern systems and only modern systems.
>
> If folks are still running Xastir on old versions of OSen or old computers
> with long-unsupported operating systems, then we can still deal with issues
> such as #202, it just takes more work (e.g., instead of using macros that
> GNU autoconf developers consider "obsolete", we write our own that do the
> same and don't yell at users about their obsolescence).
>
> So, is there anyone left who is basically using Xastir in a retrocomputing
> environment?
>

-- 
Dj Merrill - N1JOV
Currently Flying: Glastar
Previously: Cessna 150 - Glasair 1 FT - Grumman AA1B