Re: Guiding principle for dropping LLVM versions?

Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Here are some systematic rules I'd like to propose to anchor this
> stuff to reality and avoid future doubt and litigation:

> 1. Build farm animals testing LLVM determine the set of OSes and LLVM
> versions we consider.
> 2. We exclude OSes that will be out of full vendor support when a
> release ships.
> 3. We exclude OSes that don't bless an LLVM release (eg macOS running
> an arbitrarily picked version), and animals running only to cover
> ancient LLVM compiled from source for coverage (Andres's sid
> menagerie).

Seems generally reasonable. Maybe rephrase 3 as "We consider only
an OS release's default LLVM version"? Or a bit more forgivingly,
"... only LLVM versions available from the OS vendor"? Also,
what's an OS vendor? You rejected macOS which is fine, but
I think the packages available from MacPorts or Homebrew should
be considered.

You could imagine somebody trying to game the system by standing up a
buildfarm animal running some really arbitrary combination of versions
--- but what would be the point? I think we can deal with that
when/if it happens. But "macOS running an LLVM version available
from MacPorts" doesn't seem arbitrary.

regards, tom lane