[Nexus] More NAPI stuff

[Rolf Krahl]

Am Dienstag, 25. August 2015, 13:52:19 schrieb Campbell, Stuart I.:
> I don't think we should be held back by this, especially as there
> are newer versions readily available. If you want a newer cmake on
> suse then there are already packages available on the opensuse build
> service.

Of course one can easily install a newer cmake version on any system.
The problem is that many users will simply not do it, at least not on
a production system, but will rather opt to waive building NAPI on
their systems then.  These people have a very good reason to stick
with the native packages from their distribution if possible, because
if you install your own version of a package, you'll lose the vendor
support and won't get patches and bug fixes for it.

openSUSE 13.1 was only the one example that I had at hand when I wrote
my last mail.  Here is a somewhat more complete list of cmake versions
that are shipped with major distributions:

  CentOS 5: 2.6.4
  CentOS 6.6: 2.8.12.2
  CentOS 7.0: 2.8.11
  Debian 7: 2.8.9
  Debian 8: 3.0.2
  Fedora 21: 3.0.2
  Fedora 22: 3.2.2
  RHEL 5: 2.6.4
  RHEL 6.5: 2.6.4
  RHEL 7.0: 2.8.11
  SLE 11 SP3: 2.6.2
  SLE 11 SP4: 2.8.12.1
  SLE 12: 2.8.12.1
  openSUSE 13.1: 2.8.11.2
  openSUSE 13.2: 3.0.2
  Ubuntu 12.04: 2.8.7
  Ubuntu 14.04: 2.8.12.2
  Ubuntu 14.10: 2.8.12.2
  Ubuntu 15.04: 3.0.2

So, there will be some users around that have cmake 2.8.12, but many
users still use older versions.

I don't argue that we must support all of these versions at all cost.
But we shouldn't dump these users without a very good reason.

Rolf

-- 
Rolf Krahl <rolf.krahl at helmholtz-berlin.de>
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB)
Albert-Einstein-Str. 15, 12489 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 8062 12122
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