NOTE: we have the policy to always support current Debian/stable
amd at least one Ubuntu LTS release, unless hard dependency problems prevent that.
Currently, Ubuntu/Trusty is already a bit dated, but the only problematic dependency
could be libboost (1.54 in Trusty, 1.55 in Jessie).
GCC-4.8 can be replaced by GCC-4.9 in Trusty without problems
It is always a bit tricky to find out the precise lower boundary,
so we try to upgrade these requirements as our platform progresses.
For now we have used the level available on Ubuntu/Trusty to set
the lower constraints for most libraries