[Gluster-devel] Does anyone care if GlusterFS 3.7 does not work on older distributions?

[Niels de Vos]

Hi all,

As you might have noticed, we're getting quite well along with the
upcoming 3.7 release. There are many new features and improvements, but
these also require additional dependencies on the Linux (and other OS)
distributions.

Because keeping support for older operating systems is quite time
consuming, we would like to reduce the supported versions of operating
systems. Some of the issues that we already noticed:

- RHEL-5 (and clones) do not have all dependencies for the -server
  components (already no geo-replication on EL5).

- Ubuntu Precise has an old RDMA stack, potential other too old versions
  of packages too (already an issue with 3.6.2).

We try to have the glusterfs-3.6 client-side protocol compatible with
the 3.7 server-side, but we can not guarantee that this stays possible
longterm.

We need to know who is planning to deploy GlusterFS 3.7 (on modern
distributions) and would require access over the native/fuse (not
NFS/Samba) protocol to the 3.7 servers. If there is very little
interest, and no strong demand, we will likely not provide glusterfs-3.7
packages for these older distributions.

I would like to remind everyone that when GlusterFS 3.7 gets released,
version 3.4 will become unmaintained and updating to 3.5 or newer should
get planned rather sooner than later. Version 3.5 will be maintained
until 4.0 (or 3.8?) gets released, which is not planned for this year
anymore.

If you have a strong desire for GlusterFS 3.7 clients on older
distributions, contact us as soon as possible (definitely within the
next two/three weeks) so that we can look into the matter. Please
respond to this list with your explanation and requirements, or if that
is not suitable for whatever reason, email me directly.

Thanks,
Niels