Support for 2.064.2

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 12 July 2015 at 13:51:46 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Out of curiosity, how many projects are still supporting D 
> 2.064.2 compiler/runtime?  Granted that this is the version 
> shipped in the current Debian Stable and  Ubuntu LTS (which 
> will be supported until 2020).
>
> I'm both interested in how much willingness, and how much 
> awareness there are around maintaining versions that are 
> shipped with an OS whose combined market share potentially make 
> up for 50% of all Linux Servers.
>
> Also whether or not anyone actually took on board my 
> announcement last year.

I expect that in the vast majority of cases, a library or app 
written in D will work with the last version that that was out 
when it was last updated, but anything before or after that is 
questionable. Depending on which features it uses and which 
releases we're talking about, it may work just fine, but even 
though we're not doing much intentional breakage right now, we 
still have enough regressions that I don't know how common it is 
for programs to not run into any problems with a new dmd release, 
and fixing it for a new release will often break it for previous 
ones.

Regardless, with regards to intentional support, I wouldn't 
expect much of anyone to be supporting anything more than one 
release back from the current release, and if anyone asking a 
question in D.Learn or on SO or anything like that, and they're 
not using the latest release, they'll generally be told to use 
the latest release. I think that as a community, the general 
assumption is that everyone is using the latest release or git 
master and not a release that's nearly two years old.

Now, maybe we should be functioning differently in that regard, 
but enough changes with each release still that I sure wouldn't 
want to deal with supporting releases that old. If anything, I'd 
be inclined to tag versions of a library for a particular 
compiler release and tell folks to use that one if they are using 
an old compiler and make no attempt to have the current version 
of the library work with any release beyond the current one and 
maybe one older. If it did work for older versions, great, but I 
wouldn't want to put the effort in testing that each time I made 
an update, and if we really end up with releases every two months 
like Martin wants to do, then even making a library or program 
work with every release in the last year would mean testing each 
release of your library with about 6 different compiler versions, 
which I sure wouldn't want to be doing.

- Jonathan M Davis