Re: Atomics hardware support table & supported architectures

On 2014-06-24 13:03:37 -0400, Noah Misch wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 05:16:15PM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> > On 2014-06-23 10:29:54 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > > Telling people that
> > > they can't have even the most minimal platform support code in
> > > PostgreSQL unless they're willing to contribute and maintain a BF VM
> > > indefinitely is not very friendly.  Of course, the risk of their
> > > platform getting broken is higher if they don't, but that's different
> > > than making it a hard requirement.
> > 
> > I agree that we shouldn't actively try to break stuff. But having to
> > understand & blindly modify unused code is on the other hand of actively
> > breaking platforms. It's actively hindering development.
> 
> What I'm hearing is that you see two options, (1) personally authoring
> e.g. sparcv8 code or (2) purging the source tree of sparcv8 code before
> submitting the patch that would otherwise change it.  I favor middle ground
> that lets minor platforms pay their own way.  Write your changes with as
> little effort as you wish toward whether they run on sparcv8.  If they break
> sparcv8, then either (a) that was okay, or (b) a user will show up with a
> report and/or patch, and we'll deal with that.

Sounds sensible to me. But we should document such platforms as not
being officially supported in that case.

> If a change has the potential to make some architectures give wrong
> answers only at odd times, that's a different kind of problem.  For
> that reason, actively breaking Alpha is a good thing.

Not sure what you mean with the 'actively breaking Alpha' statement?
That we should drop Alpha?

Greetings,

Andres Freund

-- Andres Freund                       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training &
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