[neomutt-devel] mutt vs neomutt

David Champion dgc at bikeshed.us
Mon Feb 13 20:13:40 CET 2017


* On 13 Feb 2017, toogley at mailbox.org wrote: 
> 
> > On February 13, 2017 at 1:28 AM David Champion <dgc at bikeshed.us> wrote:
> > 
> > I would be happy, personally, to cut off older operating
> > systems at some appointed version.  It's a great principle for 2.0.
> > But to be fair we need to manage that process, not just start applying
> > breaking patches willy-nilly.  We need to be answerable to our user
> > community, not to our developers' sense of glee at doing cool new
> > things.
> 
> What exactly does that mean? Like announcing "The next release will not support OS X" ?

I'm speaking now from my own POV.  I'm a committer but I haven't
discussed this with other committers.

It's difficult to say exactly or proactively.  I'll pick on IRIX, since
it's no longer maintained (EOL 2006).  If mutt still compiles on IRIX,
great.  If a desirable patch causes mutt not to compile on IRIX, and
the workaround is both trivial and obvious, then we fix it.  Otherwise
IRIX is no longer supported.  If someone later contributes a patch that
enables IRIX support without a significant effect on the codebase, we'll
include it.

What platforms lose support?  I think it's OK to decide on a case by
case basis, but here's what I expect:
* anything no longer supported by the manufacturer
* anything we can't get anyone to test on
* OSes older than X for which there are updates (X is variable)
* OSes with irremedial, significant security issues

I would NOT extend this to making explicit choices to support only
certain compilers -- that puts our support choices into other people's
hands.  But I do think that, similarly, it's OK to decide ad hoc that a
valuable patch that breaks support for Sun Compiler Suite for Solaris
2.5 is okay.  You can get gcc for that.

-- 
David Champion • dgc at bikeshed.us
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