Re: [PATCH 00/13] Update versions of libcurl and Perl

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Oct 11, 2024, 07:40 UTC
Message-ID: <20241011074022.GC18010@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20241010235621.738239-1-sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>

On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:56:08PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

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> This series updates our requirements for libcurl to 7.61.0 (the version
> in RHEL 8) and for Perl to 5.26.0 (the version in 15.6).  I considered
> the mainstream LTS versions of RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, and SLES, but
> omitted consideration of paid support extended LTS, since we cannot
> expect Git developers to have to pay a large corporation lots of money
> just to test functionality.  This is in conformance with our policy,
> which states that versions must be "in line with the version used by
> other long-term-support distributions", which does not include extended
> LTS distributions.
> 
> The libcurl dependency changes come in incremental patches so that if we
> have people on unsupported systems, they can simply revert the patches
> that they'd like to omit.  It also makes the changes easier to review
> than one giant commit.

The libcurl changes all looked OK to me. I was a little surprised that we could move to 7.61.0, which is only 6 years old, since many long-term releases target 10 years. I guess the ones you looked at have had point releases with updated libcurl?

I don't have a strong opinion on the extended LTS issue. Like you, I don't really care about dealing with paid support. OTOH, I think in many cases there was little to no maintenance burden for these older versions, since we'd already done the work to #ifdef them. But I guess since you broke up the patches, they can always choose to revert or include what they want.

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> The Perl changes are a huge upgrade.  5.8.1, our former supported
> version, was from 2003.  5.26 has substantially improved Unicode support
> (including Unicode strings), s///r (to allow returning a modified value
> instead of modifying it in place), postderef syntax (which also provides
> better interpolation for complex expressions), and subroutine signatures
> (although these are experimental until 5.36).  These allow us much more
> readable, modern Perl.

I'm OK with a move to perl 5.26. It does feel a little weird to be mass-updating the "require" lines in stuff in contrib/ (specifically I noticed diff-highlight, since I maintain it). But 5.008 is so absurdly old that I find it hard to believe anybody would ever notice the difference.

-Peff