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.
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. 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. 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 >>
