On 2021-01-22 4:37 p.m., Robert Newson wrote:
Innnnteresting. I’m actually surprised at the inversion here (that CouchDB is
dependent on IBM to confirm CouchDB’s stability). I’ve always agonised over
even the perception that IBM/Cloudant is calling the shots. I appreciate the
reassurance that running at scale provides, of course, I just don’t think it
can be our official position.
It's a tough one. I was pretty aggressive on CouchDB running the very
latest until the scheduler collapse problem surfaced. After that, there
was another problem (I can't recall) that was pretty serious too. I took
a wait-and-see attitude at that point, and after I didn't see IBM move
forward to a newer release, didn't move forward ourselves. Looks like we
ended up in deadlock!
However! See your own comments on this:
https://github.com/apache/couchdb/issues/3115#issuecomment-729031967
I knew there was something at the back of my head on this. Guess we're
both getting old ;)
On the core point of the thread, it seems there’s no barrier to dropping Erlang
19 support, so I think we can go to a VOTE thread, perhaps best to wait till
Monday for others to chime in on this discussion though.
More important is that we already committed changes on the main repo re:
Erlang 19 about 14 months ago by Paul:
https://github.com/apache/couchdb/commit/3594f2f1fc16903c1c383ebaf205d31c9c17fb3a
I think that makes Donat's request pretty straightforward.
I also think that IBM Cloudant’s chosen Erlang release is in part influenced by
CouchDB’s lack of support for later versions and requirement of compatible with
older releases, which now appears illusory.
If we're ready to move to 21 or 22 as a default, we're ready. Let's hope
the serious issues in 21/22 are at least mitigated. I'm happy to make
the 3.3 release (or whatever is next) use the very latest version of 21
or 22 from GitHub, subject to community recommendations and
encouragement. 23 is still a WIP:
https://github.com/apache/couchdb/issues/3115
-Jon
B.
On 22 Jan 2021, at 21:19, Joan Touzet <woh...@apache.org> wrote:
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
