Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Raise minimal required version of Neon to 0.27

On Sun, Sep 07, 2008 at 03:14:46PM -0700, Blair Zajac wrote:
> There's really nothing to gain from doing so except for limiting the systems
> that svn can install on. I don't see the point. You never know when somebody
> has some ancient system that they want to install svn on. It just makes it more
> work then for somebody to get it installed.

+1

It's nice when things still work on old boxes.

I'd argue not removing existing support for third party software
from Subversion unless:

1) It obviously becomes too much of a maintenance burden for some reason.
2) We need to upgrade the dependencies because old versions don't
   have required features.

We should not force our users into dependency hell for no good reasons.

Related story (but not the exact same situation):

In BSD-land, you rarely even find *binaries* compiled on old
versions that do not run anymore. E.g. the CM3 Modula3 compiler
was originally ported to FreeBSD 4.x and still compiles and runs
on FreeBSD 7.x without modification.

In the same time frame, some Linux distros went as far as completely
removing support for static linking(!) and encrypted the stack frame
pointer as a security measure, breaking binary compatibility.
The latter can be turned off via an environment var, but users have
to set that, else any Modula3 program will crash.

I know that there are good reasons for these two changes, but they
caused me a lot of work when I was creating binaries for the CM3 5.4
release. Total PITA.

Having such roadblocks in the way when upgrading Subversion can be a
similar pain. And if such roadblocks are there for no good reasons,
people will complain, the changes will have to be reverted, and the
work of updating the dependencies will have been done in vain.

Stefan

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Received on 2008-09-08 12:21:58 CEST