[squid-dev] What os/cpu platforms do we want to target as a project?

[Alex Rousskov]

On 12/5/21 7:00 AM, Amos Jeffries wrote:
> On 5/12/21 22:44, Francesco Chemolli wrote:
>> The rationale is that we should focus our attention as a project where
>> the majority of our userbase is, where users mean "people who build
>> and run squid".

> I do not accept that a few hacks for old OS are causing pain to core
> developers simply by bitrotting in untouched code.

Squid code that should be removed (from any reasonable person point of
view) may cause significant pain. I (and, I bet, others) have wasted a
lot of time dealing with such code. Old OSes and platforms are not be
the _biggest_ contributor here, but they are a contributor, and I hope
that this thread will result in a scheme that is applicable to a much
wider set of code snippets than those OS hacks alone.


> Removing things because the majority of users are not using it would
> mean we become a Linux-only project and thus actively push people out of
> the community unnecessarily. There are active benefits gained in the
> form of better code, bug detection, and community inclusiveness from
> maintaining portable code.

Nobody questions the real benefits of supporting non-Linux platforms
AFAICT. The questions usually revolve around the benefits of a given
OS-specific code snippet -- do they outweigh the drawbacks associated
with it? It is impossible to correctly answer such questions in general,
especially in the context of a starving Project. We may have to paint
with a much broader pragmatic brush to arrive at imperfect but
reusable/generic solutions that we can afford.


> IMO specific machine architectures are not much concern to "us". The
> toolchains and vendors take care of that part so long as we provide
> half-decent code.

I would go one step further and claim that any OS-specific Squid code
that exists to accomodate OS Foo idiosyncrasies is the responsibility of
the folks working on OS Foo-based distributions. It should not be the
responsibility of the Squid project. Ideally, we should not have such
code in Squid. This is what distro patches/adjustments are for.

Alex.