On Fri, Jan 2, 2015, at 05:06 PM, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: > FWIW to the best of my knowledge, we have kept the last two MSVC > releases supported for quite a long time, but I don't know if there has > ever been a good reason for that (besides people having them installed > locally.) I would very much like us to change that tradition!
I believe the only real historical justification for this has been "try not to break people's dev environments because that's a PITA". Especially with something like MSVC, where some contributors have actually paid for Pro versions of the suite and telling them to upgrade involves spending actual money that can be a huge deterrent. In general when it's not a huge hassle for us supporting slightly out-of-date toolchains is better for our contribution story. However...given Microsoft's new stance on Visual C++, and the fact that you can get Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition[1] for free, which is exactly the Professional version licensed for use on open source and personal projects, I don't think unsupporting VC2012 would be particularly onerous. It would certainly inconvenience a few people that have already installed 2012 and now need to go install 2013 (which does take some time) but if we aren't consistently providing a build that works with 2012 then we're already inconveniencing those people, we're just not doing it in an upfront, straightforward manner. -Ted 1. http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2013-community-vs.aspx _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
