Hello, While working on INSTALL, I compared the minimum dependency versions it lists with the checks in the build systems. It appears that the checks are inconsistent across the build systems and that some of the minimum versions are IMHO too old to even be mentioned or checked for.
So let's consider dropping minimum versions from INSTALL entirely and rely on the build system checks. It seems that mentioning minimum versions in INSTALL is a practice from an early era of SVN development, when it made sense and actually mattered. The guide said exactly which versions had to be used to build SVN, and these versions were recent at that time. BTW, some of the min versions, like BDB 4.0.14, are exactly from that era. The situation today is quite different. Most of the minimum versions are 10 to 25 years old: BDB 4.0.14 was released in 2001, autoconf 2.59 in 2003, httpd 2.2 in 2005 (and it has been EOL since 2017), APR-Util 1.3 in 2008 and APR 1.4 in 2010. So I believe that SVN has very modest minimum requirements, and current Linux distributions, such as RHEL 8, meet all of them out of the box. Even RHEL 7 (extended support until 2029) meets all of the except SQLite 3.24.0 and CMake 3.20 that are new in SVN 1.15.0. INSTALL mostly duplicates the checks that are already present in the build systems and requires additional work to be kept in sync by hand. I've updated some of the minimum versions in INSTALL recently, but I think that it would be best if the build systems were the single source of truth. Hence, I'd drop the min version numbers from INSTALL. And ass for announcing raised requirements, perhaps the release notes are the right place? What do you think about all this? Thank you. -- With best regards, Pavel Lyalyakin
