On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 13:24, Piotr Kopszak wrote:
This is more a philosophical than a software engineering question, that is whether it is really worth the effort, and for how long. Sarge compatibility isn't going to be in Debian forever and more and more bugs will get involved as time goes by. So I'm afraid in the end it's a question of giving an advance warning to the users that Sarge support will by dropped by some date rather than waste time which could be used in a more productive way.
Concerning Linux: it costs almost the same amount of work to support Sarge or Etch (ignoring a few bug reports that I send to Taco or Han every now and then, but if I would not send them, Karl would complain while compiling TeX Live anyway). Compiling on someone's working machine would mean that we would drop support for many more users than just for Sarge. If we compile in virtual machine it's almost irrelevant what distribution we have there. The "philosophical" question is much more relevant with Macs. In a few weeks I won't be able to provide binaries for platform that I have been using until just a few months ago. Mojca