[Condor-users] Ongoing operating system and CPU support for Condor

[Greg Thain <gthain@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

All:

As we finish up the development of the 7.5 series, the Condor team is 
realizing that we spend a disproportionate amount supporting operating 
systems and architectures that few, if any people use.  As we have a 
fixed amount of effort to devote to Condor development, this means that 
new features that are generally useful can't be implemented.  Also, it 
makes it more difficult for us to create the platform specific features 
that would make Condor significantly better on the common platforms 
which 95% of condor users rely on.

So, we are trying to cull the long list of supported platforms to a 
smaller list, which we can better advance and support.

Proposed list of native platforms ports dropped from support for in 7.6 
series:

in the form of: cpu _ distro _ version-num

ppc64_sles_9
ppc_aix_5.2-pl5
sun4u_solaris_5.9
ia64_rhel_3  (Note this is ia64 as in Itanium)
x86_debian_4.0
ps3_yellow dog_5.0
x86_macos_10.4  (but we plan to add a newer form of 64 bit macos)


Please note that, especially in the Linux case, that a native condor 
port for some particular distro will run on many other related 
distributions.

Of course, condor will remain open source, and all of the 
platform-specific code and #ifdef's will remain in the source, should 
users want to recompile for themselves.  And, as there is a strong 
desire to maintain backward compatibility, older versions of Condor for 
these dropped platform will be able to interoperate with newer versions.

We thank you for your understanding

- The Condor team