Re: CI and test improvements

On Thu, Feb 2, 2023 at 2:12 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> > Some observations:
> > So what should our policy be on when to roll the CI image forward? I
> > guess around New Year/now (~6 months after release) is a good time and
> > we should just do it. Anyone got a reason why we should wait? Our
> > other CI OSes have slower major version release cycles and longer
> > lives, so it's not quite the same hamster wheel of upgrades.
>
> I'd argue that developers are probably the kind of people who update
> their OS sooner rather than later --- I've usually updated my laptop
> and at least one BF animal to $latest macOS within a month or so of
> the dot-zero release. So waiting 6 months seems to me like CI will be
> behind the users, which will be unhelpful. I'd rather drop the oldest
> release sooner, if we need to hold down the number of macOS revisions
> under test.

Cool. Done.

Out of curiosity, I wondered how the "graphical installer" packagers
like EDB and Postgres.app choose a target, when Apple is moving so
fast. I see that the current EDB installers target 10.14 for PG15,
which was 5 years old at initial release, and thus already EOL'd for 2
years. Postgres.app goes back one more year. In other words, even
though that preadv/pwritev "decl" stuff is unnecessary for PG16 if you
think we should only target OSes that the vendor still supports (which
will be 12, 13, 14), someone would still shout at me if I removed it.