Re: PG20 Minimum Dependency Thread

On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 7:03 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:
> > I think the idea is that we should be able to build with what the distro
> > itself supports.
>
> Quite honestly, if we demand that buildfarm owners install some
> version of python that their platform doesn't package

I know you're responding to a bunch of people arguing different
things, but you and I are in agreement that when it comes to the
*core* testing framework, an out-of-distro Python installation
requirement is not what we should be targeting for "supported
platforms". And I don't think we're going to need that.

> I'm especially
> not believing that people will install two different python versions
> in support of this.

I have a much harder time agreeing with this. The end user experience
we're going for is

    $ sudo dnf install python3.12-pytest
    $ meson configure -DPYTEST=pytest-3.12
    $ ninja reconfigure
    ...
    pytest                   : /usr/bin/pytest-3.12 7.4.2
    ...
    plpython                 : YES 3.9

That's not a burden. I doubt we'd be able to achieve that right away
with all of the PG15 supported platforms, but it's hard to believe we
couldn't get there eventually. (The above is from Rocky 9.)

--Jacob