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

Eli Zaretskii
2015-03-23T19:18:04Z

> Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2015 12:12:32 -0700
> From: Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com>
> Cc: Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>, jan.kratochvil@redhat.com, gdb-patches@sourceware.org, ktietz@redhat.com, fercerpav@gmail.com
>
> > What about developing on latest versions of Windows, but debugging on
> > Windows 9X? There could be 9X-specific problems that might require
> > that. (I had such an experience with Emacs about 3 years ago, and the
> > person who helped me debug the problem was using GDB 7.2 on a Windows
> > 98 box.)
>
> The problem is whether we have the means to support those older versions.
> I can help with XP, for instance, but not with 98. You also need to have
> people who are publicly committed to helping with the port's maintenance,
> as it's unfair IMO to ask anyone to worry about a platform that only
> affects 0.01%. Thinking from our perspective, we get more bang for our
> buck if we dedicate what resources we have to platforms that have more
> people using them.

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.