On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Jeremy Whitlock <jcscoob...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I don't get this. We are willing to do things like require Python 2.4 >> (which we did in 1.6) and consider requiring APR 1.3. These sorts of >> things impact a significant number of our users and really bring us as >> developers only modest benefits in terms of making our lives easier. > > I don't know man. Even Python 2.4 is almost 5 years old already and just > "upgrading" it came > with many things that just made life easier, like subprocess for example. > Apache 2.0 is almost > 11 years old.
How old something is should not be relevant. It should be based on what it is costing us to still support it. Usually this would only be an issue if we cannot take advantage of something because of supporting an older version. The patch to put back Python 2.3 support is pretty small. I do not see why it was important to us. > Finally, not only is RHEL4 5 years old but it's reached its EOL. This is not true. RHEL 3 is even still in support until later this year. RHEL 4 has simply transitioned to a phase of support where the criteria for making a fix is higher. http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ There are a lot of reasons enterprises run these older versions, and they are not all that they want to just run older versions. They could have hardware driver issues they are dealing with or they could have applications that require the older versions and have not been updated etc. We should not stop supporting these users unless we have compelling reasons. Like I said, compared to the other compatibility hoops we jump through based on our own rules, supporting these things ought to be minor. And as Peter pointed out, we are possibly even playing loose with our own rules when we drop these things. I just want SVN to be a better product and churning out new releases quicker. If dropping APR 0.9.x gets us a better product and shortens development time, go for it. At the same time, I'd be happy to see us blow up libsvn_wc and tell users to just deal with it for the same reasons. -- Thanks Mark Phippard http://markphip.blogspot.com/
