Re: what's going on with lapwing?

On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 4:27 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I think you misunderstood my drift.  I'm okay with setting a project
> policy that we won't support OSes that are more than N years EOL,
> as long as it's phrased to account for older PG branches properly.

Yep, I misunderstood. That sounds awesome. Let's see if others agree.

> My point was that we can implement such a policy in a laissez-faire
> way: if an older BF animal isn't causing us trouble then why mess
> with it?  Once we *do* recognize that it's causing us trouble,
> we can apply the still-hypothetical policy and ask the owner to
> turn it off for branches where it's out of support.

Fair enough. This does have the disadvantage that people will still
commit things that turn the buildfarm red and have to go into panic
mode -- perhaps not even realizing which machines are running an older
OS -- and then reactively do this. However, it still sounds like
progress over where we are today, because it would (hopefully) remove
the need for an argument about each individual case.

Honestly, I'm kind of bummed by how fast operating systems and OS
versions die these days. It seems crazy to me that I probably couldn't
reasonably build a PG from today on the laptop I started at EDB with,
or a PG from then on my current laptop. But it doesn't seem like
there's much point in fighting the tide. We shouldn't be the only
people trying to keep stuff working long after the sell-by date.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com