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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 16:12:27 +0100
> From: Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com>
> CC: jan.kratochvil@redhat.com, gdb-patches@sourceware.org, ktietz@redhat.com,
>         fercerpav@gmail.com
> 
> > 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.

Yes, I agree with the principle.

> 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.

That'd be fine with me, of course.

> (*) - 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.

Unless that person, or someone else, also offers to fix whatever
problems they found, or at least work with us on finding the bug(s), I
think I agree.