Re: what's going on with lapwing?

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 12:22 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I don't think that's the way to think about old buildfarm members.
>> Sure, nobody is very likely to be putting PG 18 on a Debian 7 box,
>> but the odds are much higher that they might have PG 13 on it and
>> wish to update to 13.latest.  So what you need to compare OS EOL
>> dates to is not current development but our oldest supported branch.

> But the work it's creating is mostly because it's still testing
> master. If it were only testing a gradually-decreasing set of older
> branches, that wouldn't seem weird to me.

I don't think it's reasonable to ask buildfarm owners to set up their
animals like that, because (AFAIK) it requires tedious, error-prone
configuration of moving parts that we don't supply, like cron scripts.

If there were some trivial way to do that, it'd be more acceptable.
Maybe invent a build-farm.conf option like "newest_branch_to_build"?
branches_to_build covers some adjacent territory, but its filtering
options go the wrong way (only branches newer than X, whereas what
we want here is only branches older than X); probably we could
also address this with more options there.

			regards, tom lane