fsnotify on previous versions of Go

[nathany]

fsnotify should still work on Go 1.3+, which was a change to syscall for Windows. If switched over to x/sys/windows it may even work on earlier versions.

The README currently mentions Go 1.6 for the vendor/ folder. This works for GO15VENDOREXPERIMENT=1 as well, and other approaches could work fine on previous versions of Go.

So the question is which versions of Go should fsnotify support?

And then how do we ensure it still supports those versions? This could be tied to the builders #136 project, as a matrix on Travis CI is only going to cover OS X and Linux.

[abh]

These days when vendored dependencies (copied into the project or not) are common I think the project can reasonably just support the last 2-3 versions. If you (for example) are still using Go 1.8 today you effectively have opted out of getting bug fixes or signed up for managing them yourself.

[arp242]

According to the changelog, the minimum version is now Go 1.12 (since 1.5.0), although the go.mod has 1.16 (but I think that might be an error?)

In the next release that should be bumped to 1.13, since it uses %w in fmt.Errorf now.

Usually "whatever the latest Debian stable ships with" is a good baseline for a minimum version, which is Go 1.15 for Debian 11.

[arp242]

Oh, we need Go 1.16 for the retract statements in the go.mod; on Go 1.13 it errors out with:

Run go test -race ./...
go: errors parsing go.mod:
/home/runner/work/fsnotify/fsnotify/go.mod:7: unknown block type: retract
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.