Re: [RFC] dropping support for ancient versions of curl

From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
Date: Apr 4, 2017, 11:54 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.20.1704041351350.4268@virtualbox>
In-Reply-To: <CACBZZX5D2cYf0-ob_Da0EsxRtZHfegezPtCGA10-sjfi0A+AoQ@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

On Tue, 4 Apr 2017, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> I think it's completely fine to include your patch as-is. At some
> point we need to pass the burden of dealing with these old software
> versions, saying that you should use a <10 year old library isn't
> unreasonable. Anyone packaging new git on RHEL5 or derivatives can
> just package a newer libcurl as well.

But how much maintenance burden is it, really? Is the continued use of those #ifdef's really worth this much discussion, let alone applying a patch that may break users who have so far been happy?

It would be a different thing if we had to have hacks to support old cURL versions, where we need to ship entire >10kB source files that tap into internal data structures that may, or may not have changed. Such a hack, I would be happy to discuss when we could possibly remove it.

But a couple of #ifdef's? C'mon, man, we can carry this *without sweat* indefinitely ;-)

Ciao, Dscho