Re: Time to retire Windows XP buildfarm host?

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> pademelon is a good example. I don't mind keeping that working if Tom
> is willing to maintain it, but here's the thing: if a certain
> portability "problem" only shows up on machines running 20-year-old
> operating systems, how much of a problem is it, really?

For the record, I don't see keeping things working on gaur/pademelon as an
end in itself. My feeling about that, as with prairiedog which is also a
museum piece[1], is more like this: when we move the compatibility
goalposts enough to break these old systems, we should know it and make a
deliberate decision that it's OK and not worth working around. At which
point I'll shut them down. But I don't want loss of old-system
compatibility to happen blindly. I think the same is probably true for a
number of other pretty-old critters in the buildfarm, for example coypu
--- it seems unlikely that many people still run such an old release of
NetBSD, but that doesn't mean we want to break it unintentionally.

> ... we can't
> realistically maintain ports to systems to which none of us have
> access, and we can maintain ports to systems to which only a few of us
> have access only if those people are willing to be fairly involved in
> fixing any non-trivial issues that pop up.

Sure, I think that comes with the territory of being a buildfarm owner.

regards, tom lane

[1] Literally. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/82134