Hi, On Sat, Feb 24, 2024 at 01:29:36PM -0800, Andres Freund wrote: > Let's just drop AIX. This isn't the only alignment issue we've found and the > solution for those isn't so much a fix as forcing everyone to carefully only > look into one direction and not notice the cliffs to either side.
While I am not against dropping AIX (and certainly won't step up to maintain it just for fun), I don't think burying this inside some "Relation bulk write facility" thread is helpful; I have changed the thread title as a first step. The commit message says there is not a lot of user demand and that might be right, but contrary to other fringe OSes that got removed like HPPA or Irix, I believe Postgres on AIX is still used in production and if so, probably in a mission-critical manner at some old-school institutions (in fact, one of our customers does just that) and not as a thought-experiment. It is probably well-known among Postgres hackers that AIX support is problematic/a burden, but the current users might not be aware of this. Not sure what to do about this (especially now that this has been committed), maybe there should have been be a public deprecation notice first for v17... On the other hand, that might not work if important features like direct-IO would have to be bumped from v17 just because of AIX. I posted about this on Twitter and Mastodon to see whether anybody complains and did not get a lot of feedback. In any case, users will have a couple of years to migrate as usual if they upgrade to v16. Michael
