Re: New Solaris CBE release available

On 3/6/26 13:46, Peter Tribble wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2026 at 9:37 PM Gregor Riepl <[email protected] 
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
>      > https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-a-new-version-of-our-oracle-
>     solaris-environment-for-developers <https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/
>     announcing-a-new-version-of-our-oracle-solaris-environment-for-developers>
> 
>      >> ... the committed support for Oracle Solaris until at least 2037, ...
> 
>     Do I smell a "we can't guarantee our stuff will work beyond the year-2038
>     problem" here, or is that just a coincidence? ;-)
> 
> 
> Given the huge amount of effort they've put in to fix Y2038 issues, I would go 
> for coincidence.
> (And I imagine the support lifetime isn't set by engineering.)

We do have some input to it, and have paid attention to the 2038 issue when
providing our input, but the current dates are indeed set by customer demand,
and there are limits to how far forward we can reliably forecast that on the
business side.

We are assuming that even if all our support contracts are finished by the end
of 2037 that some customers will want to keep running the software past that,
based on our experience with customers popping up to ask about SunOS 4 or
Solaris 2.6 many years after their support lifetimes ended, and have been
working for more than a decade now to make that possible, though we're not
100% complete yet.   For instance, this CBE release makes the snoop command
and the underlying bufmod streams module it uses become Y2038 safe (but broken
instead in 2106, as explained under "Enhancements for Developers" in
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/whats-new-in-oracle-solaris-11-4-sru-90 .)

I gave some further explanation/examples on Mastodon last year:
https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/114519310064497360
https://hachyderm.io/@alanc/114519356149693816