Re: [Swig-devel] old versions

[David B. <da...@da...>]

Regarding Python, I think you could eliminate support for all versions older than 2.3.   Just my 0.02

Cheers,
Dave

On Dec 7, 2011, at 5:56 PM, William S Fulton wrote:

> On 05/12/11 09:51, Olly Betts wrote:
>> On 2011-11-29, William S Fulton<ws...@fu...>  wrote:
>>> On 29/11/11 05:31, ol...@us... wrote:
>>>> -  PyErr_SetString(errtype, (char *) msg);
>>>> +  PyErr_SetString(errtype, msg);
>>> 
>>> I think these casts are needed for older versions of python which had
>>> the methods declared as taking char * instead of const char *. Can
>>> someone please check who has some of the older versions of python
>>> installed, so we can determine which versions will break and so we can
>>> decide if we should deliberately break these older versions, especially
>>> as this patch just removes some warnings using some additional gcc
>>> warnings. Similarly for the recent perl changes Olly put in from a
>>> similar Debian bug report.
>> 
>> I checked in both cases before making the changes (by looking at
>> documentation and/or headers for older releases), and they should work
>> for all versions the SWIG documentation suggests might work (i.e.
>> Python>= 2.0, Perl>= 5.6).
>> 
>> Personally I think we should set more realistic minimum versions (the
>> last Python 2.0.x release was more than 10 years ago; the last Perl
>> 5.6.x release was more than 8 years ago).
>> 
>> I don't think it is realistic to expect developers to test with these
>> versions - you'd need to build from source on a modern Linux distro,
>> which is pain to start with, and you're likely to need to patch the
>> source to get it to build which is more of a pain (at least this was my
>> experience with old Perl versions last time this issue came up).  The
>> alternative is to install an entire obsolete OS version...  But users
>> really won't be trying to use these versions anyway, for much the same
>> reasons.
>> 
>> We have a backlog of things which need doing, and it's better to focus
>> limited developer time on better support for current versions.
>> 
>> Here are the versions of a few of the languages SWIG has backends for
>> in the oldest supported release of each of the longer-lived Linux
>> distros:
>> 
>>         Debian      Ubuntu
>>         oldstable  8.04 LTS    RHEL 4     RHEL 5
>>        2009-02-14 2008-04-24 2005-02-14 2007-03-15
>> Perl     5.10.0      5.8.8     5.8.5      5.8.8
>> Python   2.5.2       2.5.2     2.3.4      2.4.3
>> PHP      5.2.6       5.2.4     4.3.9      5.1.6
>> Ruby     1.8.7       1.8.6     1.8.1      1.8.5
>> 
>> We dropped PHP4 support some time ago (it's had no security support
>> for over 3 years, which is a particular concern for a web programming
>> language with a patchy security track record), but for PHP5 it's
>> pretty clear that PHP 5.0 is no longer of interest, while Perl 5.8,
>> Python 2.3, and Ruby 1.8 are conservative choices for minimum versions
>> to support.
> Okay if it works with Python >= 2.0 and Perl>=5.6 then that seems 
> reasonable to me. Some of the of the old Solaris servers I have to use 
> have these so called ancient versions installed and if there isn't a 
> good reason to break backwards compatibility, then we shouldn't.
> 
> William
> 
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