CI Requirements - Lessons Not Learnt?

[Kevin Kofler]

Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> Email threads don't work to codify such requirements. What we need is
> something like an "announce new dependency to sysadmin freeze" prior to
> the dependency freeze in the release schedule. That's what I mean with
> codifying it. We need to have it in a way where devs actually check.
> It needs to be part of the process. An old email thread cannot be part
> of the process.

IMHO, the rule should be: If you need a version of a system-level dependency 
(such as xkbcommon – things that you can't just expect the KDE packagers to 
upgrade willy nilly) that is not available (as an official stable update) in 
the OLDEST supported releases of common distributions, you MUST #ifdef it. 
Then there will also be no problem for the CI.

At most, you can argue the exact list of common distributions, but surely 
something as fast-moving as Fedora should be included. Ideally, you'd take 
RHEL, i.e., support everything back to the oldest still supported release of 
RHEL, which is currently RHEL 5 from 2007 (EOL on March 31, 2017). But there 
is room for compromise there. (For example, you could opt to support only 
the LATEST RHEL release, currently RHEL 7 from 2014. Or you could ignore 
RHEL entirely and only consider fast-moving distros such as Fedora.)

        Kevin Kofler