Pushing all my opam patches to the various upstream repos I found that some prerequisites for Gappa don't build out of the box on Ubuntu 16.
I wonder what policy we should have for Linux distro support. Should we try to support Ubuntu 16 or would we say Ubuntu 18 is the minimum (and likewise on other platforms).
I wouldn't like to drop Gappa conditionally - I would rather fix the build in case we think we need Ubuntu 16 support.
The upstream support period of Ubuntu (5 years) is relevant: https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle. So Ubuntu 16 is supported until April 2021.
OTOH, Travis CI still defaults to 16.04, but they offer 18.04 and 20.04: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/reference/overview/
Somehow their policy seems “default to the oldest non-EOL Ubuntu version”. With the likely benefit that most Travis projects (most of Github) gets tested on it as well.
We don't have to support such an old version just because Ubuntu does provide support. Honestly, I don't think we should care if it creates more work.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to imply Coq should support it; what I should have added is that it’s already almost unsupported upstream.
(Also, your call anyway)
I guess what we need is gathering statistics of exotic OSes people install the coq platform on. Should I add a question to the setup script if such information may be uploaded? If yes should I ask only in case the OS is not on our short list or always?
I'm not convinced the early testers are a representative sample of the eventual target audience. We could run a poll on Discourse and advertise it on Coq-Club and Twitter if such data would be useful.
Last updated: Dec 07 2023 at 06:38 UTC