(At the end of the day, this is exactly what support tiers are for. CPython, at least to my eyes, has been very transparent about not guaranteeing support for every platform that has a C compiler.)
People who don't care about HPUX will never care about it but they would if e.g. we decided that only windows and Ubuntu were supported ... except for the windows and ubuntu python users who wouldn't care.
It's I'm-all-right Jack until it's your use case that gets bulleted.
It's on Itanium so obviously we have to move away from that to Linux but the existence of open source tools like coreutils gives us time.
No such luck with python. We have to postpone some changes as a result.
As I say, there's some kind of effect where changes that are only negative on the margins are cheered until one finds oneself on one of those margins.
> one of the co-maintainers of GNU coreutils here
However, the other maintainers, who have been doing it for many more years than I have, and various other authors are certainly more deserving than I am. I am similarly thankful to them.
(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.”)
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.