Should we call it quits on support for 32-bit

[Regina Obe]

At the very least, I'm going to turn off 32bit testing on gitlab, cause that's the most annoying right now and nothing we've been able to replicate on the other 32-bit cis we have and having that 32bit running, makes it difficult to see when there are 64-bit reds on gitlab.

I still think the berrie crasher we should fix.  I'll try to look at that later this week or next so I start getting greens on that.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2024 12:10 PM
> To: Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us>
> Cc: Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com>; PostGIS Development Discussion <postgis-
> devel at lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: Should we call it quits on support for 32-bit
> 
> There’s a theory and practice thing going on here. All the effort going into
> maintaining 32-bit CI is kind of wasted if none of the issues ever gets fixed.
> And the lack of easy access to workable 32-dev dev envs makes it unlikely they
> will get any attention. Also, the last of 32-bit users strongly depresses the
> sense of any particular urgency to addressing the issues. They *might* be
> symptoms of some other larger problem. Or they might be quirks of the 32-bit
> platform. So, priority ends up low.
> 
> ATB,
> 
> P
> 
> > On Aug 19, 2024, at 4:41 PM, Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:
> >
> >> I just kicked off a build of postgresql 16 on a NetBSD 10 RPI3 with
> >> 1G of
> > RAM,
> >> running as earmv7hf-el.  I'll see how that goes and then build
> >> postgis
> > (sticking
> >> to releases first).
> >
> > Thanks Greg let us know how this goes.
> > Yah part of me feels that these are real issues because of invalid
> > types and so we gain something from still testing on these
> > architectures and trying to fix them in due time.
> >
> > But the other part of me just wants those 32-bits off our CI trac
> > radar.  So my first thought is just remove them, maybe check in to
> > make sure they still compile or reduce the tests down to just "It
> > compiles" we are done.
> >
> > https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis  (the FreeBSD 12 x86 32-bit, which I
> > know I got to upgrade still seems to be doing okay).
> >
> > So that way, we can say, we do not guarantee all tests will pass on
> > 32-bit architectures.
> >
> > To be fair to berrie, berrie (our Rasberry pi arm 32-bit running
> > Debian 11 ) does just fine on the regular tests.
> > It's our garden crasher of tests designed to crash servers with
> > invalid inputs that she's crashing on and I think at the moment only
> > our Rasberries are doing those crasher tests and Arm 64 is doing just
> > fine on that suite of tests.
> >
> > The gitlab one is more troubling just returning wrong answers and
> > nothing I can replicate on any of the other 32-bit cis we have.
> >
> >
> >