Re: [PATCH 09/13] git-curl-compat: remove check for curl 7.56.0

> On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 08:48:51AM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> 
> > I wonder whether we want to have something like the below patch to give
> > people a better error message in case they have a version that is too
> > old now.
> > [...]
> > +#if LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM < 0x073d00
> > +# error "Your version of curl is too old. You need to have at least curl 7.61.0"
> > +#endif
> 
> IIRC we ran into some interesting situations in the past where some
> distros had older versions that had backported some features. So Git
> would continue to compile, even though it was not technically the
> version we said was needed. And a patch like the one above would break
> those systems, even they'd otherwise be OK.
> 
> Now possibly that is a little bit insane and not something we should
> worry about. I don't have good examples of what kinds of things got
> backported, but searching the archive for LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM and
> "backport" yielded this:
> 
>   https://lore.kernel.org/git/4d29d43d458f61c6dabca093f591ad8698ca2ceb.1502462884.git.tgc@jupiterrise.com/
> 
> and I seem to recall most of the discussion of this was around that
> author and RHEL/EPEL.