Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] drop support for ancient curl

On 2021-07-21 at 22:22:11, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

This series simplifies the http code by dropping support for curl
versions older than 7.19.4, released in March 2009.

This was last discussed on-list in 2017:
http://lore.kernel.org/git/20170809120024.7phdjzjv54uv5dpz@sigill.intra.peff.net (local)

My reading of why it didn't get integrated at the time was:

 - The original commit messages are opinionated about git not working
   on these versions anyway, as noted in the original thread that's
   only true of vanilla curl, but anyone impacted by these issues at
   the time was probably using e.g. RHEL, which had backports that
   confused the issue.

 - While in 2017 these versions were already ancient, RHEL 5 (released
   in 2007) was still seeing some notable production use.

   It finally got "we really mean it now" EOL'd in late 2020 when
   extended life-cycle support ended (see
   https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata). RHEL 6
   does not have a libcurl affected by these changes.

 - It ended with a patch to "error on too-old curl", i.e. to make
   compiling on versions older than 7.19.4 an error. I've ejected that
   per the discussion about backports confusing that issue.

I'm in favor of this series.  I'm actually in favor of dropping support
for RHEL 6 as well, since there is nobody providing public security
support for it, and therefore nobody but people paying Red Hat (that is,
not this project) can be expected to safely run it.  I also think ten
years is about the reasonable maximum lifetime of software.

So, with or without those changes, this seems like a good approach to
me.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA