Re: Are binutils 2.26 and earlier still maintained?

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

On 08/09/2018 05:52 PM, John Darrington wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 08, 2018 at 02:16:38PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
>       I'm trying to find out which binutils releases still have upstream support.
>       
>       Is there a document to which I can point people?
>       
>       On the glibc side, we generally only support toolchain components which
>       still have upstream support, and binutils 2.26 and earlier have issues on
>       some platforms.  This is why I want to move the general minimum
>       requirement to a later version, with upstream support.
>       
>
> What do you mean by "upstream" and what do you mean by "support"?

Various vendors maintain older binutils versions downstream.

> And like most free software the only "support" you get (unless you make
> special arrangements) is that you can ask for someone to help you on a forum
> such as this one, and hope that someone competent is kind enough to assist
> you.

“Support” means that you will provided fixes needed by the larger GNU 
ecosystem, so that people do not have to upgrade to a later version when 
GCC or glibc changes expose latent bugs, but can apply a patch from a 
release branch instead.

Thanks,
Florian