Re: CI and test improvements

On Fri, Dec 30, 2022 at 4:59 PM Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 11:57 AM Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com> wrote:
> > [PATCH 03/10] cirrus/macos: update to macos ventura
>
> I don't know any reason not to push this one too, but it's not time critical.

Some observations:

* macOS has a new release every year in June[1]
* updates cease after three years[1]
* thus three releases are in support (by that definition) at a time
* we need an image on Cirrus; 13 appeared ~1 month later[2]
* we need Homebrew support; 13 appeared ~3 months later[3]
* we have 13 and 12 in the buildfarm, but no 11
* it's common for developers but uncommon for servers/deployment

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history#Releases
[2] https://github.com/orgs/cirruslabs/packages?tab=packages&q=macos
[3] https://brew.sh/2022/09/07/homebrew-3.6.0/