Re: minimum curl version effectively changed

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2024-10-10 at 21:30:04, Alejandro R. Sedeño wrote:
> I have a patch I plan to send in tomorrow that will properly
> conditionalize using the symbol on versions of curl that have it, and
> emitting a warning otherwise. It will also follow up with some
> corrections to errors in git-curl-compat.h.
> 
> I don't think a new feature should unilaterally change the minimum
> requirements of git without some announcement and forethought.

We already have a platform support policy, which guides our behaviour
here, and it was discussed very recently.  It says this:

  Uses versions of dependencies which are generally accepted as stable and
  supportable, e.g., in line with the version used by other long-term-support
  distributions

No major Linux distributions are still using such an old version of
libcurl.  CentOS 7 is dead, and we don't typically support extended
long-term support because it comes at a cost, and it's not fair to
Git developers to require them to pay for a secure system to test
against.  I don't know of any other major OS which is providing support
for such an old version of curl either.  Usually the BSDs have a much
shorter life span for versions, for example.

So I think the oldest supported version we're going to be willing to
accept is in a clone of RHEL 8, which would be curl 7.61.  It's
certainly a mistake on our part that we neglected to update INSTALL
accordingly, but it's not a mistake that we unconditionally added
support for a feature from over a decade ago.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them or he/him)
Toronto, Ontario, CA

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