Re: [PATCH] configure / util: Auto-detect the availability of openpty()

[Michele Denber <denber@mindspring.com>]

On 07/02/20 10:46, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 02, 2020 at 04:39:55PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
>> Recent versions of Solaris (v11.4) now feature an openpty() function,
>> too, causing a build failure since we ship our own implementation of
>> openpty() for Solaris in util/qemu-openpty.c so far. Since there are
>> now both variants available in the wild, with and without this function,
>> let's introduce a proper HAVE_OPENPTY define for this to fix the build
>> failure.
> 11.4 has been out since Aug 2018
>
> The previous verison of solaris  11.3 was from Oct 2015, with EOL
> in Oct 2020 [1].
>
> Solaris isn't an officially supported platform for QEMU, but if it
> was, then we'd probably consider it a long life distro, and thus
> consider 11.3 to be out of scope for QEMU by now.
>
> IOW, instead of checking for openpty being missing, I think there's
> a decent argument to be made that we can just assume openpty exists,
> and delete the old solaris compat code entirely.
Of course there are still many people (where "many" is a relative term) 
running Solaris 10 for compatibility reasons and Solaris 10 does not 
have openpty.  The only real reason to run 11.3 is because it still has 
support for the Sun Ray thin client and that was removed from 11.4 
(which is a giant pain).  So I'm stuck running Solaris 10 in an LDOM to 
run all my old code and have Sun Ray access, and 11.4 in the control 
domain because it's the latest thing.

             - Michele


>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)
>