Den tors 22 okt. 2026 kl 00:58 skrev Pavel Lyalyakin <[email protected]>: > > Hello, > > While working on INSTALL, I compared the minimum dependency versions it lists > with the checks in the build systems. It appears that the checks are > inconsistent across the build systems and that some of the minimum versions > are IMHO too old to even be mentioned or checked for. > > So let's consider dropping minimum versions from INSTALL entirely and rely on > the build system checks. > > It seems that mentioning minimum versions in INSTALL is a practice from an > early era of SVN development, when it made sense and actually mattered. The > guide said exactly which versions had to be used to build SVN, and these > versions were recent at that time. BTW, some of the min versions, like BDB > 4.0.14, are exactly from that era. > > The situation today is quite different. Most of the minimum versions are 10 > to 25 years old: BDB 4.0.14 was released in 2001, autoconf 2.59 in 2003, > httpd 2.2 in 2005 (and it has been EOL since 2017), APR-Util 1.3 in 2008 and > APR 1.4 in 2010. So I believe that SVN has very modest minimum requirements, > and current Linux distributions, such as RHEL 8, meet all of them out of the > box. Even RHEL 7 (extended support until 2029) meets all of the except SQLite > 3.24.0 and CMake 3.20 that are new in SVN 1.15.0. > > INSTALL mostly duplicates the checks that are already present in the build > systems and requires additional work to be kept in sync by hand. I've updated > some of the minimum versions in INSTALL recently, but I think that it would > be best if the build systems were the single source of truth. Hence, I'd drop > the min version numbers from INSTALL.
LGTM. Having multiple places to maintain only mean we will forget to update some. I can also see autoconf and CMake having different minimum requirements even if only because of build system quirks. In that case, let the build system set requirements. > > And ass for announcing raised requirements, perhaps the release notes are the > right place? Yes, that seems right! > > What do you think about all this? > > Thank you. > > -- > With best regards, > Pavel Lyalyakin Kind regards, Daniel
