Re: Remove AIX Support (was: Re: Relation bulk write facility)

Hi,

On 2024-02-29 10:24:24 +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 29, 2024 at 12:57:31AM -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
> > On 2024-02-29 09:13:04 +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > > The commit message says there is not a lot of user demand and that might
> > > be right, but contrary to other fringe OSes that got removed like HPPA
> > > or Irix, I believe Postgres on AIX is still used in production and if
> > > so, probably in a mission-critical manner at some old-school
> > > institutions (in fact, one of our customers does just that) and not as a
> > > thought-experiment. It is probably well-known among Postgres hackers
> > > that AIX support is problematic/a burden, but the current users might
> > > not be aware of this.
> >
> > Then these users should have paid somebody to actually do maintenance work on
> > the AIX support,o it doesn't regularly stand in the way of implementing
> > various things.
>
> Right, absolutely.
>
> But: did we ever tell them to do that? I don't think it's reasonable for
> them to expect to follow -hackers and jump in when somebody grumbles
> about AIX being a burden somewhere deep down a thread...

Well, the thing is that it's commonly going to be deep down some threads that
portability problems cause pain. This is far from the only time. Just a few
threads:

https://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoauCAv+p4Z57PqgVgNxsApxKs3Yh9mDLdUDB8fep-s=1w@mail.gmail.com
https://postgr.es/m/CA+hUKGK=DOC+hE-62FKfZy=Ybt5uLkrg3zCZD-jFykM-iPn8yw@mail.gmail.com
https://postgr.es/m/20230124165814.2njc7gnvubn2amh6@awork3.anarazel.de
https://postgr.es/m/2385119.1696354473@sss.pgh.pa.us
https://postgr.es/m/20221005200710.luvw5evhwf6clig6@awork3.anarazel.de
https://postgr.es/m/20220820204401.vrf5kejih6jofvqb%40awork3.anarazel.de
https://postgr.es/m/E1oWpzF-002EG4-AG%40gemulon.postgresql.org

This is far from all.

The only platform rivalling AIX on the pain-caused metric is windows. And at
least that can be tested via CI (or locally). We've been relying on the gcc
buildfarm to be able to maintain AIX at all, and that's not a resource that
scales to many users.

Greetings,

Andres Freund