[service][rfc] Configurations built by the service

In the latest release of changes to the pipeline of the service, we added support for new compilers, gcc 10 and clang 10 and 11 in Linux and apple-clang 12.0 in Mac OS. As stated in the supported platforms and configurations, due to the frequent updates of the apple-clang compiler, we decided (right from the beginning of the conan-center-index) to rotate the latest 3 versions of it to keep the pace of new versions and avoiding scalability issues spending too much time generating many binaries that will not be used. Therefore, we will stop generating packages for the apple-clang 9.1 compiler soon.

To better serve the users and to have a fast CI for contributors, it is necessary to be efficient and select the configurations built by the center carefully. Otherwise, generating more and more configurations will get very challenging over time. We are working on getting some stats about the usage of the packages in ConanCenter so we can have a better perspective around this.

However, we wanted to ask you about it to know what do you think might be the considerations to stop supporting old compiler versions and, for example, move all the compilers to that same rolling version policy, meaning that we could only generate the latest 3 versions of each compiler or maybe keep generating binaries for the oldest compiler version and the two latest (again, these are only examples).

With that, the time to build packages in PRs could be reduced significantly and would open the possibility to support other configurations that might be of interest to more ConanCenter users without facing enormous scalability challenges in the future due to the number of packages to be generated.

• Do you think that we are generating configurations that are not useful?
• Would you mind if we stop generating packages for old compiler versions?
• Would you like to have packages generated for other compilers or architectures?

Thanks