Re: what's going on with lapwing?

On Thu, Mar 06, 2025 at 02:28:20PM -0500, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 2025-03-06 14:13:40 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> > > On Thu, Mar 6, 2025 at 1:07 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > >> Maybe invent a build-farm.conf option like "newest_branch_to_build"?
> >
> > > Yes, that would be nice. I also think we should mandate the use of
> > > that option for OS versions that are EOL for more than X years, for
> > > some to-be-determined value of X, like maybe 3 or something.
> >
> > It's hard to "mandate" anything in a distributed project like this.
> > I don't really see a need to either, at least for cases where an
> > old animal isn't causing us extra work.
>
> Lapwing *has* caused extra work though, repeatedly.
>
>
> > When it does, though, it'd be nice to be able to decide "we're not gonna
> > support that OS version beyond PG nn", and then have a simple recipe to give
> > the BF owner that's less drastic than "shut it down".
>
> The BF is there to be useful for PG development. BF owners contribute them for
> that purpose. I don't think we need to keep animals alive when they're past
> their shelf life, just to make the animal's owners happy - I suspect most
> won't want to keep an animal alive that we don't want.

I indeed don't want to keep lapwing up unless there is any value.  Note that it
started to fail on 2 branches after the last buildfarm client update for
reasons I don't understand.  Since everyone is complaining about lapwing
already I will just turn it off.  If anyone is interested in keeping it up on
REL_13_STABLE until its EOL (so for the next ~6 months) let me know.