As Ben just had to patch something to handle a very old version of
boost
Well, I didn't have to, but it seemed easy enough to fix rather than
having to drop support for RHEL 5.
So far we have more or less stuck with the versions of the dependencies,
rather than the policy (eg, I don't think any of those use boost 1.33
but we still require that we support it). It seems to me it might make
sense to keep these as the live requirements, that is, drop old versions
as they become older than the versions in the list above.
Sure, I don't think it unreasonable to require RHEL 6 rather than 5 now.
I think the main immediate effect would be to update to boost 1.40, and
gcc 4.4
Are you suggesting that users have to have the latest release of OS X on
Mac? Right now things will build all the way back to 10.4 - although I'm
not suggesting we need to support that forever - but I think it
unreasonable to expect everyone to use Mountain Lion, for example. Snow
Leopard is still at gcc 4.2, and a lot of people (even in the Sali lab)
still use that.