Stream: Coq Platform devs & users

Topic: Ubuntu 16 support

view this post on Zulip Michael Soegtrop (Sep 27 2020 at 10:50):

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.

view this post on Zulip Paolo Giarrusso (Sep 27 2020 at 12:39):

The upstream support period of Ubuntu (5 years) is relevant: https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle. So Ubuntu 16 is supported until April 2021.

view this post on Zulip Paolo Giarrusso (Sep 27 2020 at 12:44):

OTOH, Travis CI still defaults to 16.04, but they offer 18.04 and 20.04: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/reference/overview/

view this post on Zulip Paolo Giarrusso (Sep 27 2020 at 12:45):

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.

view this post on Zulip Théo Zimmermann (Sep 27 2020 at 20:27):

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.

view this post on Zulip Paolo Giarrusso (Sep 27 2020 at 23:22):

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to imply Coq should support it; what I should have added is that it’s already almost unsupported upstream.

view this post on Zulip Paolo Giarrusso (Sep 27 2020 at 23:22):

(Also, your call anyway)

view this post on Zulip Michael Soegtrop (Sep 29 2020 at 07:23):

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?

view this post on Zulip Théo Zimmermann (Sep 29 2020 at 07:57):

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: Jun 03 2023 at 04:30 UTC