I think there’s a categorical difference between HP-UX (which seems to no longer even be maintained by HP) and something like Linux on the top 5-6 most popular architectures.

(But with all that said: there’s no ideological dispute here. If there was a reliable way to build and test for HP-UX, I assume a lot more people would declare support for it. The problem comes down to maintainers being asked to support platforms they ultimately have no ability to support, except in the weakest sense of “it compiles.”)

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t43562 an hour ago | parent [-]

If it compiles then people like me can get it to work. What we cannot do is build an entire rust toolchain to make it compile.

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woodruffw an hour ago | parent [-]

There’s a very large body of closed issues on most popular open source projects showing that “it compiles” is nowhere close to “it works.”

	▲	t43562 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When you think about GNU autotools they're all about being able to compile on platforms that the software has never been compiled on before - that's why there are all those feature tests to see what the OS and compiler support. I've done this many times on things like AIX 4.3 and HP-UX and so on. Sometimes you can get through the compile without any problems at all and the tool often works enough for your usecase and that's a win. Sometimes there are particular little problems, sometimes it's something serious like an actual missing C library call or whatever and then you have to do some work. With nicely designed tools that have fairly wide support to begin with this tends to be easier.