Re: [PATCH 09/13] git-curl-compat: remove check for curl 7.56.0

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 03:33:26AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 11, 2024 at 08:48:51AM +0200, Patrick Steinhardt wrote:
> 
> > I wonder whether we want to have something like the below patch to give
> > people a better error message in case they have a version that is too
> > old now.
> > [...]
> > +#if LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM < 0x073d00
> > +# error "Your version of curl is too old. You need to have at least curl 7.61.0"
> > +#endif
> 
> IIRC we ran into some interesting situations in the past where some
> distros had older versions that had backported some features. So Git
> would continue to compile, even though it was not technically the
> version we said was needed. And a patch like the one above would break
> those systems, even they'd otherwise be OK.
> 
> Now possibly that is a little bit insane and not something we should
> worry about. I don't have good examples of what kinds of things got
> backported, but searching the archive for LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM and
> "backport" yielded this:
> 
>   https://lore.kernel.org/git/4d29d43d458f61c6dabca093f591ad8698ca2ceb.1502462884.git.tgc@jupiterrise.com/
> 
> and I seem to recall most of the discussion of this was around that
> author and RHEL/EPEL.

Huh, interesting, thanks for the context! I'm not really sure whether we
really should worry about such weird backports all that much. But in any
case I'm okay with not pursuing the error.

Patrick