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1b1ed1a
(Get the code!)
(Quotes are marked with the comment they reference, though some parts reply to other comments not explicitly mentioned)
In short, I think it would be acceptable to drop support for 10.04 now that the Desktop version has reached end of life [1]. While I to some degree would like to keep it (in the spirit that Widelands should build and run on anything), I don't think we should break our backs with efforts to support an older system when a clear upgrade path and currently supported systems are available. Especially since I expect there would only be a few users which would really benefit from this. I have no numbers to back this up, but I would assume most people run LTS releases have made the move to 12.04 already. (For future reference, note that 12.04 will have five years support also for Desktop releases.)
"The LTS systems are primarily targetting people which don't want (or can not) update to latest developments. The former should probably be mostly companies (which widelands does not target), the latter probably mostly due to exotic hardware" (#15)
Ok, in case someone reading this doesn't know; Ubuntu has a new release every sixth months, and every second year they have a Long Term Supported release (ie. every fourth release). There was recently some discussion regarding the normal (in-between) releases, ranging from how to deal with the overhead of supporting multiple releases in parallell to suggestions regarding doing a rolling release. One of the results was that the support period of normal releases was reduced from 18 to 9 months, in order to free up resources to focus more on the LTS. And while I agree that companies are an obvious target of the LTS releases, they are also intended for regular users who want to use their systems and not necessarily upgrade everything every six months. I'm also getting the impression that the normal releases might be shifting towards being somewhat more targetted towards developers/
My goal as mentioned above would be that Widelands can build and run anywhere. The version packaged in various distros (not limited to Ubuntu) is usually not upgraded in existing releases, but rather the new version is added to the development release, and eventually ends up in the hands of users when they upgrade. A backport can be requested though, which was done to get build17 available in 12.04 even though it was released too late for the deadline to be packaged in the official archive.
I realize it might sound contradictory to talk about LTS release with stable, proven, older software and still wanting to run the latest version of Widelands. Being a game, though, it makes sense that the majority who wants to play online will be running the latest release, so if you are stuck with an older one from the package archive of your operating system, you will have less people to play with. The version available in 10.04's package archive is build14, and I seriously doubt you would find many to play against. (You would also be missing out on tons of new features, graphic and bug fixes.) In these cases, users may either build Widelands themselves or use a service such as the stable release PPA to play the latest version. I consider this a nice bonus which we offer to people running older release, and I'm quite happy that is possible. :)
As someone mentioned, there is a value of supporting older releases, but we also need to look at whether it is worth the effort of doing so. At the moment, we have recently had multiple ftbfs issues in a release which is no longer supported on the Desktop. Solving these takes time and effort which could be spent on fixing other bugs or implementing new features. It is also likely that we will see more issues like this in the future, since most of them are caused by older versions of compilers/
I think we have done a good job keeping the development version buildable on 10.04, but now that the Desktop release has reached End of Life, I think we can drop support too. I still believe we could make build18 work on it, but I doubt the extra effor will be worth it, especially since we would be dropping the workarounds immediatly when we can start focusing on build19.
Therefore my vote goes to Fix Committed in this case.
PS.
Keep in mind that 12.04 will be supported until April 2017 (including Desktop), so we will keep support for this for a substantial period of time.
PPS.
"I stopped Launchpad from building lucid packages" (#11)
Might as well, I suppose. In fact, this might trigger some questions/
[1] https:/