Tpm for tmux < 1.9?

[javier-lopez]

Hi,

I was wondering if there is a hard reason to make tpm incompatible with older tmux versions, in Ubuntu Precise the default tmux is 1.6-1ubuntu1, I know about ppas with more up to date versions but sometimes I end in systems with older tmux versions.

I reviewed the code and made it work with tmux 1.6 by modifying slightly the tmux invocations and changing set -g with setenv -g, eg.

setenv -g @tpm_plugins "tmux-plugins/tmux-example-plugin"
run-shell "~/.tmux/plugins/tpm/tpm"

If these changes are of any interest I could work on a branch for merging on tpm.

[bruno-]

Hey, thanks for still keeping interest even though I'm so late with reviewing/merging your PRs.

No hard reasons other than making it easy to maintain stuff. I also think 1.6 might not have all the latest features implemented for other plugins (never checked this).

I'd rather look into future tmux releases. The upcoming version 2.1 will have multiple key bindings feature and we're most likely change default key bindings to prefix + ti (install), prefix + tu (update) and prefix + tU. This way we don't use the main keybinding namespace. The mnemonic for prefix + ti being "tmux install".

If you wanna investigate how to implement this feature and also keep backward compatibility (for tmux 1.9 and 2.0) that would be appreciated.

[javier-lopez]

Yep, I also though that other plugins could depend on tmux >= 1.9, specially since tpm wasn't really difficult to make it run on 1.6. Anyway, I'm happy to know that tmux 1.9 will be supported in future tpm releases.

I'll keep an eye on the project to see how the new key bindings got defined (and help if possible), thanks again for the great project =)

[GeoMaciolek]

It's worth noting that the latest releases of the two most popular server linux distributions, Redhat Enterprise Linux / CentOS 7 & Ubuntu-Server 14.04 (supported until 2024, 2019 respectively) are both on tmux 1.8, and likely will be their entire lifecycles.

I'm evaluating an alternate source for a newer edition of tmux for this purpose, but these are two extremely popular distributions; I think it's worth considering maintain support for at least tmux 1.8.

[javier-lopez]

So I went ahead and ported tpm[0] and almost all plugins[1] to tmux => 1.6, I found that all but tmux-resurrect can be implemented without losing any features, some others like tmux-copycat/tmux-yank/tmux-open require workarounds but these are transparent to the user.

[0] https://github.com/javier-lopez/tundle [1] https://github.com/javier-lopez/tundle-plugins

[bruno-]

Hey guys, I'm not sure what's a smart thing to do here..

Maintaining all the plugins requires time. My initial idea was to reduce the scope of supported tmux versions in order to give better support for what I committed to.

Supporting versions all the way back to 1.6 seemed just too much.. but maybe we could commit to making 1.8 work, at least for some plugins... As @chilicuil said, things should mostly "just work".

The alternatives to supporting older versions (thinking out loud):

• provide and maintain a trustable document/script to upgrade tmux
• support older versions in forks eg tundle-plugins

Feedback and ideas welcome

[GeoMaciolek]

I'm really in favor of supporting tmux back to 1.8, because 1.8 is going to be around for a loooong time (2024 on RHEL 7, 2019 Ubuntu 14.04). Does that mean it makes sense to support 1.8? Only if it's not horrible to do so! I don't know anything about the differences between 1.8 and 1.9.

[groggemans]

+1 for 1.8 support

[oblitum]

heh, just hit the new Bash on Windows here, 1.8.

[wolph]

If support for old versions will not be added, would it be possible to disable the warning about old versions? I use my dotfiles on several thousand servers and it's a bit annoying that nearly all of them warn me about tpm now.