[TECH DEBT] Drop support for FreeBSD < 12.3

[asomers]

Description of the tech debt to be addressed, include links and screenshots

The oldest supported release of FreeBSD is version 12.3, yet Salt still includes code for releases prior to 10.0. Can it be removed? It would ease maintenance. For example, the entire freebsdpkg module is no longer needed.

[ari]

12.2 should continue to be supported: https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup

But your point is a good one. There is also cruft in the salt-cloud bootstrap script for ancient FreeBSD.

[silenius]

think about jails too.. while our HOSTs are up to date, we unfortunately still have many 10.4-RELEASE jails running (don't ask) which are entirely configured and managed by Salt

[garethgreenaway]

Can you point out what support for FreeBSD that Salt currently has that should be deprecated? Looks like the one module, freebsdpkg, is not longer used for recent releases and could potentially be moved out into a Salt extension. Are there are any others? @krionbsd Thoughts on this one?

[krionbsd]

@asomers I guess you've to rename the subject to ... FreeBSD < 10.0 ? If so, I'm confident there are a lot of people outside who still manage their minions which are older than FreeBSD 10, I think we might ask on freebsd-ports ML what others think

[asomers]

I'm aware of the following modules that have special support for older FreeBSD versions

• The aforementioned freebsdpkg is the big one
• pkgng has a little bit, just to fall back to freebsdpkg, I think
• freebsdports has a little bit
• bootstrap-salt has some
• grains/core has some too, for FreeBSD < 10 when the freebsd-version command did not exist

I'll start a mailing list thread about it.

[krionbsd]

I'm aware of the following modules that have special support for older FreeBSD versions

• The aforementioned freebsdpkg is the big one
• pkgng has a little bit, just to fall back to freebsdpkg, I think
• freebsdports has a little bit
• bootstrap-salt has some
• grains/core has some too, for FreeBSD < 10 when the freebsd-version command did not exist

I'll start a mailing list thread about it.

awesome, thanks