Re: State of support for back PG branches

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Josh Berkus wrote:

> Tom,
>
>> Or, as you say, we could take the viewpoint that there are commercial
>> companies willing to take on the burden of supporting back releases, and
>> the development community ought not spend its limited resources on doing
>> that.  I'm hesitant to push that idea very hard myself, because it would
>> look too much like I'm pushing the interests of my employer Red Hat
>> ... but certainly there's a reasonable case to be made there.
>
> Well, I think you know my opinion on this.  Since there *are* commercial 
> companies available, I think we should use them to reduce back-patching 
> effort.   I suggest that our policy should be:  the community will patch two 
> old releases, and beyond that if it's convenient, but no promises. In other 
> words, when 8.1 comes out we'd be telling 7.3 users "We'll be patching this 
> only where we can apply 7.4 patches.  Otherwise, better get a support 
> contract."
>
> Of course, a lot of this is up to individual initiative; if someone fixes a 
> patch so it applies back to 7.2, there's no reason not to make it available. 
> However, there's no reason *you* should make it a priority.

Agreed ... "if its convient/easy to back patch, cool ... but don't go out 
of your way to do it" ...

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