Does is still make sense to allow such old webkit version in configure.ac?

[oz123]

I just notice that a recent commit added support for webkit2gtk4.1.

Yet, in configure.ac the required version is minimum of 2.6.0, which was release 9 years ago.

https://webkitgtk.org/2014/09/24/webkitgtk2.6.0-released.html

I believe there is no distro out there that ships such an outdate webkit version.

Hence, I was wondering if we can update the check to a more recent version:

WEBKIT_REQUIRED=2.39.0

Also, for clarity, this variable should maybe renamed to : MIN_WEBKIT_REQUIRED.

[lukefromdc]

There is no reason to move up a minimum required version of anything unless we are using a feature provided by that version and missing in older versions.

[oz123]

I see, but is there a reason to particularly specify an obsolete version? For package maintainers this maybe clear, for end users, it's quite misleading.

[lukefromdc]

Only misleading if something likely to be read by someone doing a default build of the package would appears to specifiy an exact not a minimum version, remember that throughout MATE if not througout most uses of autotools this refers only to minimum versions, and an advanced user reading configure.ac would probably understand that the language used (itself very old) by default is specifying a minimum version. We do not maintain autotools

We will not be unnecessarily "updating" minimum versions of dependencies beyond those actually depended on to build or run the code