Arvados

Ideally we would run our full test suite on all of our supported distros. But, that's work and cloud cost.

The next step we could take that provides the best bang for our buck would be to run the full test suite on two distros: the newest Debian/Ubuntu release we support, and the oldest one. As of late January 2024 that's Debian 12 and Ubuntu 20.04, respectively. This setup would help ensure that we're using library and language features that are available at both extremes of our support spectrum, with the least additional coding work required.

They don't both have to be in the critical path for our build pipeline. One can be the "main" set of tests we run on every merge to main before building packages, while the other runs periodically (nightly? weekly?) to catch stray issues.

TBD: Which version should be which? Personally I think I would vote that the oldest distro goes in the critical path. A lot of our development team works on the latest stable Debian, so we already have some chance of catching more recent issues just in the natural course of development. But there's pros and cons both ways.