Re: Time to retire Windows XP buildfarm host?

Hi,

On 2016-12-05 10:56:00 -0500, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Windows XP has been past end of life for quite some time. Nevertheless I
> have kept my instance running with three buildfarm members: frogmouth,
> currawong and brolga. Howeever, a recent commit (apparently fa2fa99, but I'm
> not 100% sure) started causing a compiler segmentation fault on frogmouth,
> the mingw/gcc-4.5.0 animal running on this machine.

> I could try to remedy the problem, either by making a patch or updating the
> compiler, or I could retire frogmouth and keep the other animals running, or
> I could simply retire the machine. We have coverage of more modern instances
> of all these animals, so shutting down the machine probably wouldn't be any
> great loss, and would lessen my maintenance burden a bit :-).

> Does anyone have any strong opinion in favor of keeping any of these animals
> running?

I think we'd have to officially de-support postgres for winxp in that
case. Which seems perfectly fine for HEAD, but not so nice for the
backbranches, without a warning at least. I doubt we want to support XP
for the next five years, even in the old branches, but we should give
some heads up. At least a while back XP was still heavily used in
embedded stuff, sometimes including postgres even.

I think it might be good to introduce a general formal policy of
de-supporting platforms a year or three after their OS support
ended.

Regards,

Andres