[Python-Dev] Where is our official policy of what platforms we do support?

[R. David Murray]

On Thu, 15 May 2014 19:14:55 +0200, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 May 2014 09:40:33 -0500
> Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Brett Cannon <bcannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I view stable buildbots as staying up and testing critical platforms.
> > 
> > Would "supported" and "unsupported" (or "critical" and "optional"?)
> > make more sense? "Unstable" suggests "broken" to me, not "we don't
> > really care about these."
> 
> I don't know who came up with these names in the first place.
> However there's a slight nuance here: some platform may be supported,
> but still some buildbot end up in the "unstable" category if it has
> issues of its own (for example the machine has a flaky network
> connection, etc.). And indeed there are Linux and Windows machines in
> the "unstable" category.

There's also nothing stopping us from putting a "niche platform"
buildbot into the stable group if it normally builds fine.  I suppose
it would be pretty much supported by default then, though, if it being
red was a release blocker.  But we could decide to ignore a red 'niche'
buildbot at release time; so, I think 'stable' vs 'unstable' is indeed
the most descriptive: unstable buildbots are the ones that turn red
"randomly"[*], or are always red because no one has fixed whatever
the problem is (which might be on the buildbot or in our code).

--David

[*] Yes, our stable platforms do that sometimes too, but those are test
instabilities, whereas unstable buildbots fail tests other than the known
unstable tests.