I agree that dropping server support for older OSes is a separate issue to dropping client support, and this can enable a strategy to streamline progress on the server while maintaining backwards compatibility on aging hosts - some of us don't have the ability to promptly upgrade client hosts, and many people choose Xymon because of financial constraints that also apply to the personnel costs of upgrading. For now there are no suggestions to change the BB protocol that clients use to communicate with the server, and this "API" separation allows for a different support "policy" for the Xymon client packages and codebases.

However, there still may be difficult choices to make. If we don't want to cut off support for older OSes on the client, then the client packages still need to be published somewhere. Which means, if there's a new security vulnerability, those packages would need to be updated, which requires that the build environment needs to maintain support for old OSes.

J

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026 at 03:32, Scot Kreienkamp <Scot.Kreienkamp@la-z-boy.com> wrote:
I still have older versions in my environment.  As long as the older clients are still able to send reports to servers running on the newer versions/OS's I don’t see any problems dropping support for the older OS versions.  There's no breaking change here, we're just not releasing new software versions for older OS's.  Along the same line, I don't think it would be a problem to use 4.4 as long as the older clients are able to send reports to the server on newer versions.


Scot Kreienkamp | Applications Infrastructure Architect | La-Z-Boy Corporate 
 (734) 384-6403 | 1-734-915-1444 | Scot.Kreienkamp@la-z-boy.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: Grant Taylor via Xymon <xymon@xymon.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 1, 2026 5:30 PM
To: xymon@xymon.com
Cc: Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net>
Subject: [Xymon] Re: Struggle supporting new OSs

On 3/1/26 3:47 PM, Nicola wrote:
> Hi, I have been thinking about this in a while, and I am now convinced
> that we should aim at a 4.4.0 release which just drops support for old
> libraries not available or deprecated in modern OSs/distributions.

Hum.

> We can rename and `sed` the version for the current 4.4 branch, but this
> will ease many of the efforts which are draining our energies to keep
> compatibility, and at the same time if we need minor bugfixes in the 4.3
> branch, we can add them for dinosaurs which still require old libraries.

I don't object to a significant change in backwards compatibility in
concept.

> What do you think?
I think that any such significant change in backwards compatibility
should likely be done at a major version number.  So how about 5.x
instead of 4.4.x

Just my opinion.



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Grant. . . .

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