On Mon, Jul 07, 2025 at 06:15:51PM +0200, Ruediger Pluem wrote: > Based on the discussion on the support for an old libcurl version with the > release currently voted on I would like to start > a discussion how long we should support old 3rd party library versions we > depend on. I think we should define a set of rules > and document them somewhere on the website or in the documentation. > > Just some rules I quickly thought about as a discussion starter: > > 1. Do not support versions past 10 years of their release. > 2. Eventually shorten 1. if the open source version of the library is > unsupported upstream and bugs in the old library prevent > things from working any longer.
I think it would make more sense to define minimum supported versions in terms of the platforms we want to support, e.g. we expect 2.4.x to run on Ubuntu >= A, RHEL >= B, Debian >= C, or similar. This is close to what we do in practice already because it's how users consume the code, and is testable in CI. Testing against a dozen(?) libraries which are ">= N years old" is a moving target and would be near-impossible to automate. Regards, Joe
