CentOS Death in 2021

[Mark Wieder]

On 12/15/20 3:48 AM, Richmond via use-livecode wrote:

> 2. Stir up trouble.
> 
> Personally I think that LiveCode central are being a bit @#$%^&* 
> claiming that LiveCode
> is cross-platform and not saying they support more recent versions than 
> Ubuntu 16.04 and so on.
> 
> And stirring up trouble means that I think they deserve a collective 
> kick in the source-code for that.

I may be in the minority on my opinion on this, and judging from the 
feedback I expect from this post that may be an understatement, but...

I think the team is correct in this.
Support means more than "we think this works".

Since they currently build and test each released version on an older 
linux distro, they can't really claim to "support" later versions, even 
though we can empirically verify that there is essentially no difference 
when running LC on other/later linuxes. Claiming support would mean 
dedicating resources to changing the build process, verifying that the 
resulting build performed to spec on whatever linux version, and also on 
an ongoing basis dedicating support team resources to whatever issues 
may arise on the newly officially supported platforms.

And at present there's very little ROI for making these changes. Even 
the modifications that a few of us do contribute require redirecting 
company resources to verify (or not) before merging into the corpus of 
releasable code, and with the current worldwide situation I doubt 
there's a lot of free time to squeeze into redirection from actual 
revenue-producing streams.

Since Ubuntu's EOL date is coming up in the next few months, I expect 
that the build platform may change soon. But since I can compile from 
source here on linux mint 20 (Ubuntu based) (as long as I modify the gyp 
file as in my PR) I don't expect major hiccups nor any major expense in 
team resources from this migration.

> 
> 3. As far as I can see (probably not very far), there is no difference 
> in functionality between Xubuntu 16.04 and 20.10;

See above, but yes, I agree.

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com