[Bastille-linux-discuss] Dropping support for older OS releases

[James W. D. <jwd...@tw...>]

I was reading through Peter Watkins stand-alone distribution of the Bastille
firewall scripts (which I use on some systems that I harden in ways other
than strictly using Bastille), when I got thinking about the overhead of
carrying support for older OS releases in the current (and future) releases
of Bastille.  It's been quite a while, chronologically, since a version 
of Linux
didn't offer iptables support.  Peter's scripts would certainly be a 
good bit
smaller without the ipchains support they still include.  Might it be 
time to start
consider dropping support for older features and older versions of Linux?

Now ipchains and the Bastille firewall scripts might be a bad example.  It's
been a good while since the first Linux releases with iptables support were
delivered, but it's not been all that long I guess.  But, Bastille 
supports Linux
versions that are MUCH older than that.  What is our overhead to handle 
this?
Is it worth considering trimming some of that overhead.

This is really a question, as I've not dug through the code to try to 
answer it.
But I figured I would ask, lest I forget it by the morning :-)

Just to (potenially) bolster the argument, how would the HP folks like 
to include
HP-UX 9.X support?  HP-UX 8?

Hell, if Red Hat can sundown just about everything they've released, 
sholdn't
we ;-)

-- 
James W. Durkin
jwd...@tw...