Re: Remove last traces of HPPA support

Noah Misch <noah(at)leadboat(dot)com> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 11:16:28AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Hence, the attached removes the remaining support for HPPA.

> I wouldn't do this. NetBSD/hppa still claims to exist, as does the OpenBSD
> equivalent. I presume its pkgsrc compiles this code. The code is basically
> zero-maintenance, so there's not much to gain from deleting it preemptively.

I doubt it: I don't think anyone is routinely building very much of
pkgsrc for backwater hardware like HPPA, on either distro. It takes
too much time (as cross-build doesn't work IME) and there are too few
potential users. I certainly had to build all my own packages during
my experiments with running those systems on my machine.

Moreover, if they are compiling it they aren't testing it.
I filed a pile of bugs against NetBSD kernel and toolchains
on the way to getting the late lamented chickadee animal running.
While it was pretty much working when I retired chickadee, it was
obviously ground that nobody else had trodden in a long time.

As for OpenBSD, while I did have a working installation of 6.4
at one time, I completely failed to get 7.1 running on that
hardware. I think it's maintained only for very small values
of "maintained".

Lastly, even when they're working those systems are about half
the speed of HP-UX on the same hardware; and even when using HP-UX
there is no HPPA hardware that's not insanely slow by modern
standards. I can't believe that anyone would want to run modern
PG on that stack, and I don't believe that anyone but me has
tried in a long time.

regards, tom lane