On Dec 18, 2011, at 4:57 PM, Alex Valavanis wrote:
- Gradually inch forward with dependency versions. Drop linux
LTS-release support for trunk, but maintain support for all current non-LTS distro versions (e.g. Ubuntu Maverick and higher).
I think this around the right approach... given decent set of definitions of course.
Where we usually see issues is with exactly what "current" means. To some it means "the latest and greatest of bleeding edge of the distro". To others it means "versions that have not yet seen end-of-life."
A good choice can be to avoid explicitly excluding LTS releases.
In general we end up with far more concern about "getting tied down with compatibility" than comes up in real life. Normally we've seen that either a bit of minor #ifdef tweaking can give proper fall-back functionality, or in many cases just not use new functionality when built for older libs.
We have a major break with certain cairo issues (aka the need for updated libs as a requirement is not an easy one to make backards compatible), but that is the exception rather than the rule.
We also have the wiki page to try to bring the questions out of the abstract and to be more concrete.
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Tracking_Dependencies
I'm generally happiest when we don't just block users accidentally. To bring that back to your example, we can take a look at the gdl need. Fedora and OpenSUSE seem fine, and I'd then say that Canonical has messed things up enough for their own users that dropping Lucid support for newer Inkscape is not too hard. Hopefully once the whole Unitly/GNOME3 shift has settled out we should be able to get back on track with better version support.