On 22.02.2022 15:58, George Dunlap wrote: >> On Feb 22, 2022, at 12:18 PM, Wojtek Porczyk <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 09:50:25PM +0000, George Dunlap wrote: >>> I think it’s too much effort to ask developers to try to find the actual >>> minimum version of each individual dependency as things evolve. >> >> By "find the actual minimum version", do you mean to get to know the version >> number, or install that version on developer's machine? > > Well suppose that a developer writes code that depends on an external > library. The external library on their own machine is 4.5; so they know that > 4.5 works. But will 4.4 work? How about 4.0? Or 3.9? Or 2.2? Maybe it > works on 3.8+ and 2.13+, but not 2.0-2.12 or 3.0-3.7. > > I don’t think it’s fair to ask people submitting patches to do the work of > tracking down which exact versions actually work and which ones don’t > actually work;
But somebody will need to do this. If it's not done right away, someone (else) will hit a build issue on a perhaps just slightly older platform. Jan > particularly because... > >> The second part very much depends on distro, but all of them have provisions >> to install older versions of packages, though not all of them might carry all >> the possible versions (i.e., it might be that you need version X, Distro A >> has >> had versions X-1 and X+1, but never packaged version X). Again, if this is >> a problem, it depends on the actual package and compatibility situation. > > …of things like this. > > -George
