nunit: NUnit Framework no longer buildable using VS2015
I decided to do a quick check of an issue by writing a test (#2619 if it matters) so I pulled down master, created a branch and opened VS2015.
Turns out none of the projects load any longer. They do load in VS2017 (with errors in my case) and in researching I discovered the BUILDING.md file now says VS2017 is required, where previously we were able to build the framework using VS2012 and higher.
I feel this is a real loss and - to be quite frank - displays something of a disdain for those who don’t upgrade to the “latest and greatest” when told to do so by the vendor. With some degree of caring for such folks, this could easily have been done in a less painful way or possibly not done at all.
However, if it had to be done, it should not have been slip-streamed but rather given serious visibility. Only those who participated in the details of the change would have a way to know the consequence. There are people who build NUnit from source and every commit to master is a potential source release for them.
If this change can’t be mitigated - well, actually won’t is the operative word, since it obviously could be done - then we need to have a pretty big notification going out to those users. IMO, it should be accompanied with an apology for springing this on them.
For me personally, this was a rather unpleasant surprise and appears to remove my ability to contribute to our primary project unless I convert to VS2017. 😢
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: closed
- Created 7 years ago
- Comments: 17 (17 by maintainers)
If being able to build from source on legacy platforms was part of the .NET opensource values, all the other opensource projects didn’t read the manifesto. All of the top 15 active, non-Microsoft projects on NuGet, have switched to the new Visual Studio 2017 format and require VS2017. Most don’t even support compiling on all platforms. NUnit does support compiling all of our targets on Windows, Mac and Linux. That was not the case before the switch to the new project format. If anything, we are now more inclusive.
When we switched to requiring Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 (for C# language level 6 and for .NET Standard) we didn’t announce it on the mailing list. We only discussed that change in a pull request and an issue. We have also had seven releases since we made that change and nobody has complained that they could not compile from source on their platform of choice.
I don’t see why requiring VS2017 is any different than requiring VS2015, but if you feel that it deserves an announcement then we will make one.
Just a thought. Users that hit breaking changes in our API aren’t afraid to voice their expectations loud and clear. That’s a good thing. For users who build from source, changing the project format is a much bigger change than an API break. So if there are users who specifically build from master, and they weren’t happy with the new format, I’d expect to be hearing from them any time.