On Tue, May 11 2021, Felipe Contreras wrote: > Jeff King wrote: >> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 11:27:54PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote: >> > Jeff King wrote: >> [...] >> > I've never understood developers worried about how the bleeding edge >> > would build in ancient platforms, when ancient platforms don't care >> > about the bleeding edge. >> >> Again, this is about developers. Are there people contributing new >> documentation to Git who are doing so on Debian stable, and would be >> inconvenienced by needing to upgrade their toolchain? > > Developers don't need to create (or use) debian packages. They can > simply do `gem install asciidoctor` and be done with it. Some may even > create a docker container to install all the doc toolchain in order to > avoid polluting their main environment. > > I for one would start building the documentation more if all I needed is > one dependency. Just because I'm developing the latest git.git revision on Debian stable that doesn't mean that I'm keen to install the very latest openssl, libcurl, asciidoc, C compiler, or whatever other thing we depend on. I'm not disagreeing with bumping the dependency in this case (I haven't looked into it). I'm just pointing out that in general there's a lot of use-cases for e.g. building a latest git on an N year old OS. Of course we can ask these people to just build their dependencies too, as I noted in [1] in a past discussion. Whether we bump our required dependencies is a trade-off between our own convenience and these sorts of in-the-wild builds. I'm just saying we should keep this use-case in mind, it's not an all or nothing where you either have ancient deps + ancient git or bleeding edge deps + bleeding edge git. A lot of people build ancient deps + bleeding edge git. The "just use the built doc tarballs" is only a partial solution, and e.g. won't work for someone who's interested in building "next" or otherwise applying local patches that have doc changes. 1. https://lore.kernel.org/git/874ltg2tvo.fsf@xxxxxxxxx/
