[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH 2/2] Require compilers to support C17.

[Niklas Haas]

On Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:13:22 -0500 Devin Heitmueller <devin.heitmueller at ltnglobal.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 5, 2024 at 2:59 PM Anton Khirnov <anton at khirnov.net> wrote:
> >
> > It should be available in all relevant modern compilers and will allow
> > us to use features like anonymous unions.
> 
> Is everybody on board with the implications for this patch in terms of
> platforms we allow building on?  For example, the gcc on Centos7
> doesn't support C17, and that isn't *that* old of a platform.
> 
> If all the developers agree that we won't support less than Centos8,
> then so be it.  But I think this should be a conscious decision, and
> we might want to reflect it in the documentation somewhere on what
> major platforms/versions we expect to be able to build on.
> 
> Devin

Note that CentOS 7 stopped receiving package updates 4 years ago, and
will stop receiving security fixes in a couple of months. So this
discussion has an expiry date.

I think that having this change negatively affect somebody would require
an extremely specific set of circumstances. Most systems running such
old distros tend to be headless servers, not generally the type of
environment you'd expect somebody to be cloning the latest version of
ffmpeg and compiling it from source. And if somebody is committed enough
to attempt this anyway, they might as well also compile/download a more
up-to-date toolchain.

Many of our not-mandatory-but-typically-desirable dependencies are
already required at significantly newer versions. (For example, OpenSSL
3.0.0, required for HTTPS, is from 2021)