On 25/04/2020 23:44, Steffan Karger via mbed-tls wrote:

Hi,

I maintain OpenVPN-NL (https://openvpn.fox-it.com), which uses mbedtls as it's crypto library.

On 24-04-2020 00:25, Gilles Peskine via mbed-tls wrote:

...

1. Is there any interest in the community for making sure that the build

keeps (or starts) working on RHEL 6?

Yes, we support RHEL6 until it's retirement (30 November 2020).

(…)

It would be nice if it's at least possible to build mbedtls on/for these platforms until they go out of regular support. Preferably with their default packages compilers.

All right, thanks for the feedback! I'm not going to promise that we'll add RHEL 6 to our CI. (Of course, in TrustedFirmware, it can happen if someone's motivated enough to contribute it and to keep maintaining it.) But let's at least not knowingly break support for CMake 2.8 yet (or GNU make 3.81 or older GCC and Clang but those are less likely to break).

I expect that it will remain possible to build the library *for* ancient systems for a very long time, since all it really needs is a basic C runtime. But the tooling to build the library, or at least to do anything more than building the library (tuning the configuration, building and running tests, etc.) is slowly modernizing (the configuration script and the test building script have required Python 3 for a while now).