Re: State of support for back PG branches

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

> "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@postgresql.org> writes:
>> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>> Maybe something like this would do: "We will attempt to maintain support
>>> of each major version for 3 years after its release, although this will
>>> not always be possible. After that time any major support requirement is
>>> likely to result in support being ended."
>
>> This sounds reasonable to me ... I think it is more then most software
>> projects do, isn't it?
>
> To translate that into reality: 7.2 (2002-02-04) would be dead already,
> and 7.3 (2002-11-27) will be dead around the time we are likely to
> release 8.1.  Do people feel comfortable with that?  It seems to fit
> with what I'd like to do right at the moment, which is to release
> updates back to 7.3 but not 7.2.

IMHO ... after 3 years of running on a version, if someone hasn't hit some 
of the bugs that we're back-patching for, the either aren't going to, or 
should have that as an encouragement to upgrade ... in most cases, I 
believe that alot of the ones you've back patched for, its something 
you've fixed in a "recent release", and ended up going looking for in past 
releases to make sure they were safe ... no?

> I'd prefer to measure the time from the release of the follow-on
> version, so I'd make it "2 years from release of following major
> version"; that would give people a clearer idea of the time frame
> in which they're expected to update their applications.  But I'm not
> wedded to that.

'k, if you mean 'major version' == x.0 (ie. 7.0.0, 8.0.0), then I think 
the span of time + 2 years is *way* too long, considering an  average of, 
what, 5 years between major releases ...

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