On Tue, Apr 04, 2017 at 10:17:51AM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 4, 2017 at 4:54 AM, Jeff King <p...@peff.net> wrote: > > My feeling is that this is old enough to stop caring about. Which means > > we can drop some of the #ifdefs that clutter the HTTP code (and there's > > a patch at the end of this mail dropping support for everything older > > than 7.11.1). But that made wonder: how old is too old? I think it's > > nice that we don't force people to upgrade to the latest version of > > curl. But at some point, if you are running a 13-year-old version of > > libcurl, how likely are you to run a brand new version of Git? :) > > > > If we declared 7.16.0 as a cutoff, we could unconditionally define > > USE_CURL_MULTI, which gets rid of quite a few messy ifdefs. > > I don't object to this patch, but just as a general comment, in > enterprise-y environments using an old OS (e.g. CentOS 5/6) & then > compiling some selected packages like git based on OS libraries is > quite common. > > E.g. at work we're running git 2.12.0 compiled against CentOS 6 > libraries, which has curl 7.20.1, released on > Apr 14 2010. Not so long ago we were still running CentOS 5 which > comes with 7.15.5 released in Aug 7 2006 which would break with your > patch. > > Whether we support that is another question, I think it's reasonable > to say that if you're compiling git on such an old system you also > need to compile a libcurl instead of using the OS version. I just > wanted to point out that this *does* happen, someone is going to be > compiling new git releases on CentOS 5 & will be hit by this. Thanks, that's a very useful bit of data. According to: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata RHEL5 (which as I understand it basically the same as CentOS 5 in terms of packages) ended its 10-year support cycle just a few days ago. That would perhaps make 7.20.1 a reasonable cutoff. I dunno. We could also just punt on the whole thing. It was nice to see a bunch of #ifdefs go away, but the code they're protecting is actually not that complicated. Most of them do not have an #else at all, and we just silently skip features on old versions. I think it might be nice to declare a "too old" version, though, just so we can stop adding _new_ ifdefs. Maybe 7.11.1 is that version now, and in another few years we can bump to 7.16.0. :) -Peff
