On 18/06/14 17:15, Robert Haas wrote:
>>>> 6) armv-v5
>>>
>>> I think this is also a bit less dead than the other ones; Red Hat's
>>> shows Bugzilla shows people filing bugs for platform-specific problems
>>> as recently as January of 2013:
>>>
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=892378
>>
>> Closed as WONTFIX :P.
>>
>> Joking aside, I think there are still usecases for arm-v5 - but it's
>> embedded stuff without a real OS and such. Nothing you'd install PG
>> on. There's distributions that are dropping ARMv6 support already... My
>> biggest problem is that it's not even documented whether v5 has atomic
>> 4byte stores - while it's documted for v6.
>
> I think in doubtful cases we might as well keep the support in. If
> you've got the fallback to non-atomics, keeping the other code around
> doesn't hurt much, and might make it easier for someone who is
> interested in one of those platforms. It's fine and good to kill
> things that are totally dead, but I think it's better for a user of
> some obscure platform to find that it doesn't *quite* work than that
> we've deliberately broken it. But maybe I am being too conservative.
>
I think quite the opposite, it's better to say we don't support the
obscure platform than saying that we do and have no active testing or
proof that it indeed does and somebody finding the hard way that there
are issues.
I also have hard time imagining somebody in 2016 installing brand new
Postgres 9.5 on their 20 year old 200Mhz (or something) machine and
doing something meaningful with it. It's not like we are removing
supported platforms from old releases, but this basically means we are
going to support some of the obscure almost dead platforms till at least
2020, in some cases longer than their creators and even OSes.
-- Petr Jelinek http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training &
Services
