Re: [PATCH] RFC: Version support policy

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki <marmarek@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 04:05:19PM +0100, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 22.02.2022 15:58, George Dunlap wrote:
> >> On Feb 22, 2022, at 12:18 PM, Wojtek Porczyk <woju@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
> >> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 09:50:25PM +0000, George Dunlap wrote:
> >>> I think it’s too much effort to ask developers to try to find the actual
> >>> minimum version of each individual dependency as things evolve.
> >>
> >> By "find the actual minimum version", do you mean to get to know the 
> >> version
> >> number, or install that version on developer's machine?
> > 
> > Well suppose that a developer writes code that depends on an external 
> > library.  The external library on their own machine is 4.5; so they know 
> > that 4.5 works.  But will 4.4 work?  How about 4.0?  Or 3.9?  Or 2.2?  
> > Maybe it works on 3.8+ and 2.13+, but not 2.0-2.12 or 3.0-3.7.
> > 
> > I don’t think it’s fair to ask people submitting patches to do the work of 
> > tracking down which exact versions actually work and which ones don’t 
> > actually work;
> 
> But somebody will need to do this. If it's not done right away, someone
> (else) will hit a build issue on a perhaps just slightly older platform.

That's why declare what version _should_ work (and test that via CI),
instead of trying to find what is the minimum version that is actually
required. This may result in saying "you need libfoo 3.4" while in
practice 3.3 would be fine too, but I think that's reasonable
compromise.

-- 
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab

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