[Qgis-developer] QgsExpression: replacement for QgsSearchString

[Martin Dobias]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 9:58 AM, Marco Hugentobler
<marco.hugentobler at sourcepole.ch> wrote:
> Hi Martin
>
>> Looking at the version history of bison, the 2.4.x releases started in
>> 2008 while the 2.3 release went out back in 2006. Maybe we could drop
>> support for 2.3 ? Apparently even debian stable ships with 2.4.x.
>
> Debian stable isn't the most conservative distro any more. It's the enterprise
> distributions. E.g. I have the mentioned problem on a CentOS 5.6 machine (for
> the foss4g WMS benchmark), and 5.6 seems to have appeared 8. April 2011.
>
> Personally I have no problem with 2.4 as minimum (e.g. generating the parser
> file with my ubuntu locally and copying to the server). I'm however not sure if
> we might frustrate some admins trying to compile qgis on their enterprise
> distros.

Umm... I wonder what policy we should use here. Apparently there will
always be users with old systems and old libraries, not wanting to
upgrade just because of QGIS. On the other hand I think we are still
quite conservative about the versions of software we depend on since
we do not require very recent releases.

We might want to pick a rule of thumb saying when to safely drop
support for old versions of software and what is the earliest time to
depend on a recent release. I would say that e.g. 3 years are enough
to drop support for old sw and not to depend on releases younger than
one year. For example we have used Qt4.4 as a requirement for several
QGIS releases - that version dates back to 2008 and thus we may
probably push the minimal required version to 4.5 or 4.6 in order to
use newer APIs.

Martin