Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Scope of backward compatibility

[Jing Luo]

On 2024-01-19 17:01, Ineiev wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 19, 2024 at 01:26:38PM +0900, Jing Luo via Discussions 
> among Savannah Hackers, open subscription wrote:
> > Anyway...it's not "we may stop supporting MySQL", because MySQL is 
> > already
> > unsupported as the status quo is. MariaDB is so great. I love it.
>
> You may mean MySQL support by its developers; I was speaking about
> MySQL support in Savane. we consider fixing incompatibilities
> with MySQL, therefore we support it.

I did not mean support by its developers. At least it's safe to say 
Savane's support for MySQL is broken. If it doesn't work, it's not 
supported.

> > Speaking of compatibility, it's not clear what Savane's policy is: I 
> > also
> > mentioned it in the email I sent to savannah-hackers-private.
>
> The supported versions of dependencies are listed in README; when
> unspecified, it usually means that we've never encountered versions
> that wouldn't work for us.
>
> > PHP 5.4 was first released in 2012, and even PHP 7.4 was decleared
> > EOL in 2022.
>
> Probably you mean support by PHP developers, and that isn't
> a very good criterion. Trisquel 10 is still supported, it comes
> with PHP 7.4, and Savannah frontend is running Trisquel 10
> currently (I shan't mention the distro releases that other
> machines like fencepost or internal run).

Let me clarify. My point was that it's not worth your effort to support 
old PHP versions that are already not supported by PHP's developers.

Do FSF admins "want" to upgrade the VMs or do they want to stay on old 
distros?

> > Is there a reason that Savane has to maintain its backward
> > compatibility with ancient software?
>
> These days, to continue to support old PHP versions is incomparably
> easier than to support the new releases, so we'll gain little if we
> stop supporting them.

By all means, drop support for PHP 8.2 :)

> > If Savane's maintainers don't mind maintaining ancient software, 
> > that's fine
> > too; if we want to clearly define a scope, this would be an example:
> > "everything included in Trisquel 9 or Debian 10". Another thing to 
> > consider
> > is Savane's downstream, and currently the only publicly known 
> > downstream (?)
> > is Puszcza's fork, which uses the 3.1 cleaned up version.
>
> The most important "downstream" are private local instances
> of testers. for example, occasionally I run Savane on a machine
> that simply can't boot Trisquel 9.

That's unfortunate. Are you unable to acquire a no non-free firmware 
machine that works with newer versions of Trisquel?

> > Btw, Puszcza introduced git homepage support a few years ago.
>
> You must be confusing it with some other feature.

My mistake. This [1] is probably something else.

[1] 
https://git.gnu.org.ua/savane-gray.git/tree/lib/Savane/Feature/Homepage/Git.pm

--
Jing Luo
About me: https://jing.rocks/about/
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