On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 11:56:08PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote: > 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. > > The libcurl dependency changes come in incremental patches so that if we > have people on unsupported systems, they can simply revert the patches > that they'd like to omit. It also makes the changes easier to review > than one giant commit. The libcurl changes all looked OK to me. I was a little surprised that we could move to 7.61.0, which is only 6 years old, since many long-term releases target 10 years. I guess the ones you looked at have had point releases with updated libcurl? I don't have a strong opinion on the extended LTS issue. Like you, I don't really care about dealing with paid support. OTOH, I think in many cases there was little to no maintenance burden for these older versions, since we'd already done the work to #ifdef them. But I guess since you broke up the patches, they can always choose to revert or include what they want. > The Perl changes are a huge upgrade. 5.8.1, our former supported > version, was from 2003. 5.26 has substantially improved Unicode support > (including Unicode strings), s///r (to allow returning a modified value > instead of modifying it in place), postderef syntax (which also provides > better interpolation for complex expressions), and subroutine signatures > (although these are experimental until 5.36). These allow us much more > readable, modern Perl. I'm OK with a move to perl 5.26. It does feel a little weird to be mass-updating the "require" lines in stuff in contrib/ (specifically I noticed diff-highlight, since I maintain it). But 5.008 is so absurdly old that I find it hard to believe anybody would ever notice the difference. -Peff
