Re: Patent issues and 8.1

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

> What's really being debated here is how we can have adequate confidence 
> in a change that is admittedly larger than we like to back-patch.  It's 
> not an unprecedented thing mind you; we have back-patched some fairly 
> large bug fixes in the past.  But it's a bit galling to be taking any 
> such risk for purely legal rather than technical reasons.

How hard would it be to do as several have suggested already ... abstract 
out the ARC/LRU stuff into an API?  Then, we wouldn't have to remove ARC, 
per se, only shift it?  Wouldn't that be a smaller patch overall?  Then, 
for our non-US users, they could continue to use ARC even after the patent 
(myself included), while a plug-in replacement could be available for US 
users?

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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664