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Policy on Backwards Compatibility?

Open blowmage opened this issue 3 years ago • 3 comments

m recently dropped Ruby 2.6 because it is EOL, and pinned the required Ruby to 2.7. But, m is building against Minitest 4.x, who's last release (4.7.5) was on June 22, 2013. And m does not specify a version of test-unit, and so the CI build uses the current version which is 3.5.5. (For the record, the last release of test-unit 2.x (2.5.5) was on May 18, 2013.)

So I am wondering how much backwards compatibility m is interested in maintaining. Is it worth building against 10 year old dependencies when it drops Ruby 2.6.0 which is only 5 years old.

tl;dr - I would like to either:

  • Drop Minitest 4.x
  • Add test-unit 2.x

What is everyone's opinion on this?

blowmage avatar Dec 10 '22 19:12 blowmage

I'm always for keeping the compatibility. I believe the fact that gems maintainers drop the Ruby version support once it's declared as not supported by Ruby devs is just a confusion and misunderstanding. The gems should support old rubies as long as possible and never drop it just because of the rubylang news, because that's irrelevant.

Nakilon avatar Dec 26 '22 11:12 Nakilon

@Nakilon Thoughts on making changes like #105 that require newer rubies?

blowmage avatar Dec 26 '22 16:12 blowmage

@Nakilon Thoughts on making changes like #105 that require newer rubies?

Sorry if I miss anything, I was generalizing anyway. But from docs I see that ripper is a thing in ruby for a long time already.

Personally, If a hypothetical addition wants several ruby versions upgrade I would want to see the rationale why it has to be done. As long as it works the same, I see no profit. Unless it's a security measure (that is unlikely a factor for software like this one).

Nakilon avatar Dec 26 '22 17:12 Nakilon