Are binutils 2.26 and earlier still maintained?

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Guys,

>>  I'm trying to find out which binutils releases still have upstream support.

Right - the official answer is "none".  That is we - the binutils project - do
not make any guarantees about supporting any releases.

The unofficial answer is that we are interested in, and will try to resolve, any 
bugs in any of the binutils releases.  But if the release is an old one, and the
bug is fixed in a newer release, then the most likely response will be "use the
newer release".  Actually the most likely response will be "please try the newer
release first, and if the problem still exists, then please contact us again".

So, we[1] will investigate bugs in the mainline development sources, and bugs in 
the most recent release, but other than that users are most likely to be urged to
upgrade first.

Binutils maintainers in the various different distributions are free to provide
their own support for any release they like, of course.


>> Is there a document to which I can point people?

No.

You could point them at the binutils/README file however, which does say:

  "Always mention the version number you are running; this is 
   printed by running any of the binutils with the --version 
   option.  We appreciate reports about bugs, but we do not 
   promise to fix them, particularly so when the bug report is 
   against an old version.  If you are able, please consider 
   building the latest tools from git to check that your bug 
   has not already been fixed."

Cheers
  Nick

[1] When I say "we" I am of course referring to the binutils community as a whole,
although as part of my role as Chief Maintainer I consider it my responsibility to
look at any bug report that has not been picked up by anyone else.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://sourceware.org/pipermail/binutils/attachments/20180821/241f3b60/attachment.sig>