Re: AIX support - alignment issues

Hi,

On 2022-07-02 16:34:35 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Agreed. But I think that this sort of thing is better driven by
> "when there's no longer anyone willing to do the legwork" than
> by project policy. IOW, we'll stop when Noah gets tired of doing
> it (and no one steps up to take his place).

I do think we should take the impact it has on everyone into account, not just
Noah's willingness. If it's just "does somebody still kind of maintain it"
then we'll bear the distributed cost of complications for irrelevant platforms
way longer than worthwhile.

> In the case at hand, given that the test added by 79b716cfb/c1da0acbb
> correctly detects troublesome catalog layouts (and no I've not studied
> it myself), I don't see that we have to do more right now.

What made me look at this issue right now is that the alignment issue lead the
56bit relfilenode patch to move the relfilenode field to the start of pg_class
(ahead of the oid), because a 64bit value cannot be after a NameData. Now, I
think we can do a bit better by moving a few more fields around. But the
restriction still seems quite onerous.

Greetings,

Andres Freund