[issue42173] Drop Solaris support

[STINNER Victor]

STINNER Victor <vstinner at python.org> added the comment:

Copy of my email sent to python-dev.

https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/46UUJ4J5YLCWF2JQMC5L7OIYG6PNQLRL/

Since I created the issue and the PR, and sent this email to
python-dev (one week ago), many Solaris and Solaris-like (ex: Illumos)
users replied that the operating system is definitively alive. I
didn't know that Oracle still ships new Solaris updates every month:
that's a good thing!

But this is not enough to support a platform. We would need proactive
contributors to fix known Solaris issues, but also fix new Solaris
issues (either regressions, or bugs newly discovered). We would also
need a buildbot to run the Python test suite on Solaris (or again, a
Solaris-like OS).

The good news is that Jakub Kulik started to fix some Solaris issues.
I understood that Solaris and Solaris-like operating systems do have
downstream patches on Python to fix a bunch of bugs. It seems like
some people want to push these fixes to Python upstream which is also
a good sign.

The other problem that I wanted to discuss is that fixing Solaris
issues require core devs (who merge PRs) accessing Solaris. If
contributors send patches and some core devs are fine with merging
fixes without being able to test them manually, I'm also fine with
that.

My first intent was to remove support for a definitely dead operating
system, but it seems like I was completely wrong (it's alive!). Thanks
to people starting to fix Solaris issues, I close my PR and I no
longer plan to drop Solaris support. I prefer to leave bpo-42173 open
for now, since people decide to use it as a place to collaborate on
fixing Solaris issues.

Once most tests will pass on the master branch, I also hope that
someone will set up a buildbot *and* fix issues discovered by this
buildbot. Sorry but just setting up a buildbot doesn't solve any
problem, it only increases the maintenance burden for people who
maintain the buildbot fleet. For example, we have two AIX buildbots, I
report bugs on bugs.python.org, but it seems like nobody is available
to fix them...

Overall, I'm quite happy with what is happening with Solaris! More
collaboration, issues being fixed in Python upstream. I just hope that
this work will continue next months. ;-)

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