RHEL3 support for firmware-tools

[Michael E Brown]

The following message concerns "firmware-tools" and
"firmware-addon-dell" users on RHEL3. This does not apply to libsmbios.


So I have looked at RHEL3 upside-down and backwards a couple of times,
and I've come to the conclusion that I cannot effectively support RHEL3
(and derivatives) on an ongoing basis for the following reasons (from
roughly major to minor):
    1) lack of testing machines (all my test boxes run RHEL4/5, or newer
       fedora (with some ubuntu boxes coming online)

    2) age of python on rhel3 - Python 2.2 is missing ctypes, logging,
       and decorarators, to begin with. I keep running into strange and
       wonderful ways in which my code breaks on the older python. I
       tried to get around this by setting up a unit testing
       environment, but I could never get enough code coverage to be
       sure I dont break somebody.

    3) no boost. My next major chunk is coming online in the form of
       'pysmbios', and it has a strong dependency on boost_python.

    4) developer contributions - If there were somebody who would be
       willing to maintain a RHEL3 "port", I could possibly overlook the
       lack of decorators, but at this time there are no contributors
       for RHEL3.

Due to these reasons, I am going to stop building RHEL3 packages for
firmware-tools and firmware-addon-dell.  Addditionally, I will remove
the currently-posted-but-known broken packages.

About leaving 'last-known-good' available: 1) I'm not sure what the last
known good is, and 2) the BIOS update RPMs have loose dependencies on
firmware-tools and I am not going to spend time testing old/new
combinations.

Again, the libsmbios project will continue to support RHEL3 for the
forseeable future. This message only pertains to firmware-tools and
subprojects.

Sorry for the inconvenience.
--
Michael Brown