Re: Problem with PostgreSQL 9.2.7 and make check on AIX 7.1

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Hm. Unfortunately, you're kind of on your own to debug this; AFAIK
> there are no active Postgres developers who use AIX. It's been awhile
> since there was an active AIX buildfarm machine either, so that it
> would not exactly be astonishing to find that we'd inadvertently
> broken something for that platform. (And I'm not sure there ever
> was a buildfarm member running AIX 7.1 anyway; according to
> http://buildfarm.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/show_members.pl
> grebe was running 5.3 when last heard from, half a year ago.)
>

We retired the AIX boxes, and aren't adding more, so it's not
likely to be us that retrieve this support. :-(

There might be some elderly servers still kicking around, but
I imagine that new licenses would need to be purchased in
order to have AIX 7.x run on them, which might readily cost
more than the hardware's worth.

I was glad to help provide buildfarm support on AIX; it certainly
was helpful to get issues dealt with, and meant that pretty much
all "usual" Postgres functionality (including contrib modules)
worked well, which wasn't the case pre-buildfarm.

We're still willing to support AIX, but we can't do it without help
> from users of that platform. If you send in a patch for whatever
> is broken, we'll almost certainly accept it (in some form). But
> it would be a good idea to set up a buildfarm animal so that any
> future breakage gets detected in a more timely fashion. See
> http://buildfarm.postgresql.org/index.html
>

Indeed, if someone's keen on having AIX supported, then it's
important to be able to spare enough resources for a buildfarm
node. It doesn't mean that you'll need to devote development
resources to deal with every problem that comes along; I
recall a number of cases where I saw email threads go past
where Tom (or someone else) was poking away at a problem
noticed because grebe "turned red."

Someone with useful contacts at IBM might ask if they have
a server hiding somewhere that could be used as a buildfarm
animal.
--
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"