[Opm] Dependencies revisited

Tue Jan 28 09:36:57 UTC 2020

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 09:00:26AM +0000, Atgeirr Rasmussen wrote:
> Despite what I initially wrote (that I want to increase the requirements), if we turn away potential users by this, that would be a good reason to NOT bump the requirements.
> 
> Arne Morten's message implies that we can still provide binary packages for new releases (i.e. 2020.04 and 2020.10 etc.) for Ubuntu back to 16.04.
> But does that still hold if we also increase compiler requirements to gcc 8.3? If not, perhaps we should only increase the Dune version for now?
>

well, even Arne Morton has to admit that supporting a wealth of distributions and versions often results in a great amount of work.
We have seen that for Ubuntu and Redhat as well.

I guess we have to decide what we want, and what the user wants. People who always want the latest and greatest, might have to
do so with their distribution as well.

I would not consider our current releases maintenance updates (we actually do not have these). So while ubuntu LTS will give you
maintenance update for 4 years, if you buy fancy new hardware you only have a  change of getting it supported after for 2 years.
Hence it seems reasonable to guarantee / thrive for new releases to support a two year old ubuntu. https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
What one could do is provide bugfix releases for the versions on Ubuntu for 4 years.

That would mean

Ubuntu YY.04 LTS will be supported by 20YY.04 until 20{YY+2}.04 (and maybe their bugfix releases.

For Debian versions the current End of life seems to be 3 years (no support by Dian any more) https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/debian.
One can get 2 years limited support via Debian LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS.

So if we consider the LTS phase as "you might not get a new OPM version", then dropping Debian 9 for 2020.04 seems sound.

Markus

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