Disabling COMPAT_FREEBSD4/5/6/7/9 as a default kernel option

[Konstantin Belousov]

On Mon, May 27, 2019 at 03:55:21PM +0200, voidanix at 420blaze.it wrote:
> Hello,
> I wanted to discuss about bug 231768 a bit: it is about keeping 
> COMPAT_FREEBSD4/5/6/7/9 on by default in the kernel configs.
What problem are you trying to solve ?

> 
> The patch attached for the bug is for disabling these options by 
> default, following a few reasons which I'm going to list here:
>      - Keeping support for deprecated libraries isn't exactly the best we 
> could do to avoid security issues (if there are any) as I'm sure nobody 
> wants to spend that much time maintaining such stuff (it's enough to 
> think about misc/compat4x in the ports tree: that version of FreeBSD was 
> released on March 2000 and keeping 19 years old libraries around isn't 
> ideal)
>      - Devs should get track of time and realize that developing software 
> using unsupported libraries is NOT something that you should do
This is nonsense.  These options are not for developing new software.

>      - Only a tiny fraction of the ports need COMPAT_FREEBSD9 or older: 
> if the software won't compile without the legacy components (and has a 
> replacement of some kind), considering removal wouldn't be a bad idea
And that options are usually not about ports.

>      - This is on by default: most users don't care or don't use binaries 
> that old
This is I am really interesting about.  How do you know ?  The method
you came to this conclusion should allow us to solve many other old
issues, I hope.

> 
> I don't see any practical reason to keep these options on by default, 
> but I do appreciate any sort of input regarding this issue.