Re: [PATCH 09/13] git-curl-compat: remove check for curl 7.56.0

Patrick Steinhardt [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

I wonder whether we want to have something like the below patch to give
people a better error message in case they have a version that is too
old now.
[...]
+#if LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM < 0x073d00
+# error "Your version of curl is too old. You need to have at least curl 7.61.0"
+#endif

IIRC we ran into some interesting situations in the past where some
distros had older versions that had backported some features. So Git
would continue to compile, even though it was not technically the
version we said was needed. And a patch like the one above would break
those systems, even they'd otherwise be OK.

Now possibly that is a little bit insane and not something we should
worry about. I don't have good examples of what kinds of things got
backported, but searching the archive for LIBCURL_VERSION_NUM and
"backport" yielded this:

  https://lore.kernel.org/git/4d29d43d458f61c6dabca093f591ad8698ca2ceb.1502462884.git.tgc@jupiterrise.com/ (local)

and I seem to recall most of the discussion of this was around that
author and RHEL/EPEL.

Huh, interesting, thanks for the context! I'm not really sure whether we
really should worry about such weird backports all that much. But in any
case I'm okay with not pursuing the error.

Yup, the runtime die() would work it around for such versions of
libcURL with silent backports.

The message should be made _("localizable"), though.

Thanks.