Re: Are binutils 2.26 and earlier still maintained?

[Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>]

On Thu, 9 Aug 2018, Florian Weimer wrote:

> > 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.

I don't think that corresponds to any notion of support we actually use 
for deciding what versions of other components to support.

It's not what's relevant for deciding what Linux kernel versions are 
supported in glibc - we use https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html 
as a convenience for deciding when something is old enough not to care 
about it any more (though not necessarily the exclusive source to consider 
for that purpose), but there is no expectation that the LTS Linux kernel 
releases will get particular fixes relevant to glibc.  Similarly when we 
consider what Python versions to support.  For GCC our oldest supported 
versions tend to be significantly older than the release branches that are 
still maintained, and many dependencies do not maintain past release 
branches at all (but we declare old versions unsupported based on when 
there is some actual benefit to doing so rather than simply because the 
old release is no longer maintained).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com