proposal: Databend Platform Support Policy

[Xuanwo]

Background

Databend used to say that we support running on Linux & macOS both on amd64 & arm64 platforms. But we didn't say we which versions we support.

For example,

• Is databend-qeury works on Ubuntu 16.04 (amd64)?
• Is bendctl works on macOS Mojave (arm64)?

This problem becomes more serious for the Linux platform, as described in those issues:

• Newly released bendctl started failed for libssl.so.1.0.0 not found #3423
• Missing runtime dependencies in Docker #2063
• [Build] replace openssl libc dynamic linking #3570

So, we need to define a clear policy for databend platform support. With this policy, our users will know which platform is native, and which platform needs extra work or cost.

It's a contract between developers and users.

Proposal

So I propose a draft for our first version of platform support.

• All our binary will share the same policy
  • For now, they are including databend-query, databend-meta, databend-benchmark and bendctl.
• All our binary will support platforms that listed the following:
  • All Ubuntu versions that have standard support (in short, 18.04 and 20.04, https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases), both on amd64 and arm64
  • All maintained macOS versions (in short, 10.15, 11, 12, https://computing.cs.cmu.edu/desktop/os-lifecycle), both on amd64 and arm64.
• Failed to run on the supported platform will be recognized as a bug, we will fix them as soon as possible.
• Failed to run on the non-supported platform will be recognized as a feature request, we may provide alternative solutions like
  • statically linked binary (drawback: binary size increased)
  • run as a container (drawback: dependent on docker/podman)

---

Welcome any comments!

[everpcpc]

Maybe we should temporarily keep back the arm64 image base?
It seems cross-rs/cross#591 has no progress yet recently.