On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 06:18:10PM +0200, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
> We received criticism in the past from potential users as we promise
> support for many Operating Systems and depend on libarchive in
> ./bootstrap.sh written in C++. The C++ language is a high entry point
> for 23 supported platforms, especially if half of them are long dead...
> even if we pass the bootstrap stage on more vivid ones, we end up with
> severely broken environment (like stopping on Perl for AIX).
If you want to invent arguments, please get them straight at least.
libarchive doesn't depend on C++.
Apologies for my terse email yesterday - I was wanting to head off the assumption that not hearing anything negative for 20 minutes meant that everyone was happy with what was suggested.
Far from culling older/legacy platform support, I think we should add to it. What I mean by this is the provision of older compiler suites, older binutils, and even consider a simplified bootstrap for those kind of platforms. The existence of this should not be a problem for anyone using the latest and greatest software that's out there.
People who have legacy systems don't want to run gnome3 or kde5, or anything c++11 or c++14 - they want straight, solid support from a cross-platform packaging system that can provide them with what they want.
I have no idea why there is a call for getting rid of something that would be beneficial for a number of users; I'm sure it would attract new ones.
Regards,
Alistair