Re: minimum Meson version

On 18.06.25 19:53, Andres Freund wrote:
> 1) We don't remove support for OS versions unless they block something

Maybe it's worth clarifying the interpretation of this.

For example, for the purpose of this thread, I wouldn't consider RHEL8 
to be blocking anything at the moment.  It's technically blocking moving 
the meson requirement past some version, but that in turn isn't really 
blocking anything.  You can always find a new feature in any build 
dependency that you might want to use but don't really have to.

(Also, they sometimes ship updated python or openssl versions, for 
example, so there is also a possible difference between support in its 
original version, support with updates, and no support at all.)

But as another example, if by some miraculous development we decided to 
drop autoconf for PG19, then RHEL8 would block that, but then (by some 
of the policies a-e) we could drop RHEL8 support.

But my intuition is that if we did that right now, many vendors would 
just have to patch the support back in, which could be great consulting 
money, but wasteful overall.  So if the age cutoff landed on today, it 
might be too early.  (Or I suppose by your rule #4 they could just keep 
supplying upstream patches to keep the support alive.)

(I initially thought that RHEL8 was a typo for RHEL7, because we still 
support RHEL7!!  We should drop that first!)