Old Stuff

[Wall, Stephen]

> From: owner-freebsd-security at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> security at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Aaron C. de Bruyn via freebsd-
> security
> Subject: Re: Old Stuff
> 
>On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 9:58 AM Robert Simmons <rsimmons0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I wonder if FreeBSD should drop support for 32bit? Clean out and remove all
>> of it. It should make the code base easier to maintain, cleaner, and safer.
>>
>> In this same vein, let's deprecate and remove things like telnet and ftp.
>
> Why remove telnet and FTP?

Why not?   It's not difficult to install ftp as needed from the ports tree - there are a number of clients and servers available there, including a newer version of tnftp, which is what appears in freebsd base.  I can't imagine it would be very difficult to migrate the base telnet to ports, either.  It'd be a bit less cruft in the base system that has to be maintained.  That applies to tftp as well.

Unless the base system is actually using any of them.  I don't know that.

> From: owner-freebsd-security at freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-
> security at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Igor Mozolevsky
> Subject: Re: Old Stuff
> 
> On Wednesday, 24 July 2019, Robert Simmons wrote:
> > I wonder if FreeBSD should drop support for 32bit? Clean out and remove all
> > of it. It should make the code base easier to maintain, cleaner, and safer.
> 
> Because nobody has a 32bit computer nowadays??? Similarly, you got any
> empirical evidence to back up the "... safer" part of your speculation?

I have to agree with Igor here - there are still 32-bit SOCs out there intended for embedded use. It's likely there are commercial users of FreeBSD developing for those platforms.

-spw