Re: [PATCH 00/13] Update versions of libcurl and Perl

[Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:56:08PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> For a long time, we ended up with protracted discussions on the mailing
> list about what versions of software we should support.  Oftentimes, we
> broke long-obsolete operating system versions by using something shipped
> slightly more recently.
> 
> Fortunately, we now have a platform support policy to guide us in our
> approach to dependencies, so we can make updates without worrying about
> breaking systems that have not received security support in several
> years.
> 
> This series updates our requirements for libcurl to 7.61.0 (the version
> in RHEL 8) and for Perl to 5.26.0 (the version in 15.6).  I considered
> the mainstream LTS versions of RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, and SLES, but
> omitted consideration of paid support extended LTS, since we cannot
> expect Git developers to have to pay a large corporation lots of money
> just to test functionality.  This is in conformance with our policy,
> which states that versions must be "in line with the version used by
> other long-term-support distributions", which does not include extended
> LTS distributions.

For what it's worth, this patch series breaks our GitLab pipeline
because we still exercise Ubuntu 16.04, which uses an old version of
curl that's not supported anymore after this patch series lands. We have
just recently started adopted that job in GitLab because GitHub couldn't
support it anymore, but we wanted to keep around the test coverage for
such oldish platforms.

So if we want to declare Ubuntu 16.04 as unsupported, this patch series
would also have to remove the CI job.

Patrick