[Qgis-developer] QgsExpression: replacement for QgsSearchString

[Marco Hugentobler]

Hi Martin

> 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

Sounds good to me. 
In any case, it would be good to give a descriptive error message to the user 
(e.g. 'your bison is too old, use version >=2.4').

Regards,
Marco  

Am Montag, 29. August 2011, 23.53:56 schrieb 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


-- 
Dr. Marco Hugentobler
Sourcepole -  Linux & Open Source Solutions
Churerstrasse 22, CH-8808 Pfäffikon SZ, Switzerland
marco.hugentobler at sourcepole.ch http://www.sourcepole.ch
Technical Advisor QGIS Project Steering Committee