Re: Guiding principle for dropping LLVM versions?

Hi,

On Thu, 2023-09-21 at 10:54 +1200, Thomas Munro wrote:
> I'm trying to understand the practical constraints.  Perhaps a package
> maintainer could correct me if I have this wrong.  Distros typically
> support a range of releases from the past few years, and then bless
> one as 'default' by making it the one you get if you install a meta
> package eg 'llvm' without a number (for example, on Debian 12 this is
> LLVM 14, though LLVM 13 is still available).  Having a default
> encourages sharing, eg one LLVM library can be used by many different
> things.  The maintainer of the PostgreSQL package then chooses which
> one to link against, and it's usually the default one unless we can't
> use that one yet for technical reasons (a situation that might arise
> from time to time in bleeding edge distros).  So if we just knew the
> *oldest default* on every live distro at release time, I assume no
> package maintainer would get upset if we ripped out support for
> everything older, and that'd let us vacuum a lot of old versions out
> of our tree.

RPM packager speaking:

Even though older LLVM versions exist on both RHEL and Fedora, they
don't provide older Clang packages, which means we have to link to the
latest release anyway (like currently Fedora 38 packages are waiting for
LLVM 16 patch, as they cannot be linked against LLVM 15)

Regards,

Regards,
--
Devrim Gündüz
Open Source Solution Architect, PostgreSQL Major Contributor
Twitter: @DevrimGunduz , @DevrimGunduzTR