Re: [PATCH] Add IPv6 support for remote TCP connections

Pedro Alves
2015-04-13T15:12:32Z

Hi guys,

Revising this, trying to move us forward.

On 03/23/2015 07:17 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Yes, this is all well-known. However, I thought the issue was a bit
> different: not whether we want to spend efforts on active support of
> these platforms, but rather whether we should try to avoid
> deliberately breaking them by introducing features that are not
> available there, and leaving no fallbacks for when those new features
> are unavailable.

I agree you have a point here. It's hard to write a rule about this,
because I think it'll depend on the importance of the feature, and
the how much maintenance would keeping the fallback code really
impose. In this case, it should be possible to add IPv6
support while leaving support for IPv4-only in place without much
trouble. We can continue discussing which versions of Windows
we should still support in parallel, but we don't _really_ need to
be blocked by that. So unless I managed to convince
you (this time! :-)) that it's OK to blindly (*) drop support for
ancient Windows versions, we'll revise the patch to keep the support for
IPv4-only code.

(*) - I do think though that if someone actually tries running GDB
on such older versions, and finds support has been broken for a
few releases, we should declare such versions unsupported, instead of
fixing things until they work, because it clearly means that nobody
has been paying attention already for years.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Pedro Alves