Subject: Re: how to determine oldest supported version of git

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 13:23:40 -0600

Hi Neal,

Neal Kreitzinger wrote:

> What is the best way for me (a git user) to determine what is currently the 
> oldest supported version of git (the oldest version still getting bugfixes)? 
> IOW, when can I tell that my version of git is no longer supported?

It depends what supported means.  Even very old git releases might get
point updates to fix major problems such as security bugs.

If you want to see which branches Junio is actively maintaining,
looking at the last commit date from the maint-* branches on [1] is
one way.

However, in my experience people interested in product lifetimes more
often mean "versions the vendor will respond to bug reports about"
rather than "versions getting updates".  If you have discovered a bug
in an old version of git, even if it is only a couple of major
releases ago, a good debugging strategy is almost always to try with
the newest release and see if it still exhibits the bug.  If you don't
try that, people on this list might just try it themselves.  If it
doesn't affect recent releases, I would not be surprised if people on
this list do not necessarily care much.  One can more easily interest
me at least by pointing out which regression is making it hard to
upgrade instead.

Thanks,
Jonathan

[1] git://github.com/gitster/git.git