Putting together a collection of Bash scripts that will be released to a wider audience of users with expectation of various operating systems and software versions. The scripts themselves rely on software like mysqldump and getopt.
Being a good citizen, I would like to figure out what is the minimum version required by my script of each of the third party programs I’m using, bash included.
Short from installing distros of an old OS somewhere and testing this randomly, can anyone offer any advice on what would be the best approach for determining these version requirements?
Software involved: bash, mysql, mysqldump, getopt, bzip2
(My guess would be that the true version requirement is ‘any’, but of course can’t be sure…)
You might look at the changelogs of the programs in question, but that would be quite tiresome.
The
pbuilderwould make testing with old distributions much easier. It sets up a chroot-ed environment for a debian-compatible distribution. Set up a sh script testing your scripts, run it in a pbuilder environment for an old distribution, and see how old you can get. All in all, given an sh file, this test boils down to ~10 lines of additional sh code for the pbuilder test. If you can run on the current oldstable distribution of Debian, you’re most probably sufficiently compatible.