> On Feb 9, 2017, at 3:17 PM, Gavin McDonald <ga...@16degrees.com.au> wrote:
> 
> 
> Name all the non-Linux, non-Windows machines that we have shut down that 
> affected you and your project directly please, Im interested to know. I’m 
> very interested in hearing how the shut down of these has negatively impacted 
> your willingness to spend time on ASF projects. 
> (What flavour OS you work on is up to you)

        The Mac OS X host was shut down literally a day after I sent out an 
email to common-dev@hadoop announcing I had full build and patch testing 
working.  I had spent quite a bit of time getting Apache Yetus ported over to 
work on Apache's OS X machine, then spent over a month on working out the 
Hadoop specifics, running build after build after build. Competing with the 
Apache Mesos jobs that also ran on that box. The reason I was told it was 
killed was: "no one was using it".  (Umm, what?  Clearly no one bothered 
looking at the build log.)

        In parallel, I started working on the Solaris box.... which was then 
promptly shutdown not too long after I had filed a jira to see if we could get 
the base CA certificates upgraded. (which was pretty much all I needed, after 
that I could have finished getting the Hadoop builds working on it as well).

        These were huge blows to Apache Hadoop, as one of the common complaints 
amongst committers is the lack of resources to do cross platform testing. Given 
the ASF had that infrastructure in place, being in this position was kind of 
dumb of the project.  Now the machines are gone and as a result, the 
portability of the code is still very hit or miss and the ASF is worse for it.

        Since that time, I've helped get the PowerPC build up and running, but 
that's been about it... and even then, I spend little-to-no time on the 
ASF-side of the build bits for those projects I'm interested simply because I 
have no idea if I'll be wasting my time because "whoops, we've changed 
direction again".

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