On 22/01/2021 15:48, Robert Newson wrote:
> I’m +1 on dropping Erlang 19 support. Erlang is now on major release 23.

No problem here.

> I’d further advocate a general policy of supporting only the most recent 2 or 
> 3 major releases of Erlang/OTP.
>
> The main (I think only?) reason to keep compatibility so far back is because 
> of the versions supported by some OS’es. I don’t feel that is a strong reason 
> given the couchdb install, in common with Erlang-based projects, is 
> self-contained. The existence of Erlang Solutions packages for all common 
> platforms is also a factor.

That hasn't been the case for at least 2 years, if not longer.

As the release engineer, I've been focused on stability for everyone.
This is largely driven by knowing that IBM/Cloudant largely run CouchDB
on 20.x at scale. Standing on the shoulders of giants, our releases run
the latest 20.x release at the time of binary generation.

A few times recently issues cropped up in 21 and 22 that we didn't
encounter in our user base because, at scale, we are deployed on
20.3.8.something. Some of these issues were non-trivial. (I'm off today,
so I don't have the time to dig into the specifics until Monday.)

So my $0.02 is that: if IBM/Cloudant is ready to move to something newer
at scale, I'm ready to release binaries on a newer Erlang by default.

The alternative (running newer Erlangs in the binary distributions than
IBM/Cloudant run in production) could possibly be perceived as treating
our open source customers as guinea pigs. I'd rather not risk that
perception, but am willing to be convinced otherwise.

-Joan

> 
> B.
> 
>> On 22 Jan 2021, at 19:54, Bessenyei Balázs Donát <bes...@apache.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> CI for https://github.com/apache/couchdb-config appears to be broken.
>> I wanted to fix it in
>> https://github.com/apache/couchdb-config/pull/34/files , but I'm
>> getting issues with erlang 19. Are we okay with dropping 19 support
>> there?
>>
>> On a different note: are we okay with dropping erlang 19 support
>> overall in couch project(s)?
>>
>>
>> Thank you,
>> Donat
> 

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