Re: [Monotone-devel] netsync flag day justifies bumping version number to 1.0

[Timothy Brownawell]

On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 12:52 +1000, Daniel Carosone wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 08:24:24PM -0500, Timothy Brownawell wrote:
> > How long would we want to try to stay compatible with old versions,
> > maybe 2.5 or 3 years? Debian releases last 4 years now (2 as stable, 2
> > as oldstable), and Ubuntu LTS releases happen every 2 years and are good
> > for 3 or 5 years. RHEL versions are apparently supported to some degree
> > for 7 (!) years.
> 
> I'm really struggling with this whole concept.  It's come up both in
> this thread, and in zwol's about dependencies.  
> 
> I don't see why an operating system choice (let alone which variant of
> an operating system, or which variant of the variant) by an end user
> matters.

If end-users can do "apt-get install monotone" (or equivalent), that's a
rather lower barrier than having to go find a more recent version on our
downloads page, and is one less reason for projects to avoid us. So it
would be nice to have compatibility back far enough to cover whatever
"most" people who might want version control are running, or would be
thought to be running.

> For building new versions of the application on that platform, with
> minimal fuss in terms of additional dependencies, as a common courtesy
> to maintainers within reasonable bounds, sure.  That's just a general
> portability goal. Providing support guarantees, especially outside
> those reasonable bounds, surely is the support vendor's risk,
> responsibility and therefore business model.  

I'm not thinking about maintainers at all here, I'm wondering if
requiring extra setup by whatever fraction of other projects' developers
are running a stable distro release might scare projects away. Maybe
that's a completely bogus concern, though.