Re: Unclear EOL

Greetings,

* Peter Eisentraut (peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com) wrote:
> On 09/09/2018 18:01, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> As for a specific suggestion, I would amend our current policy to state
> >> that we support each major version for 5 years, with the last release of
> >> a given major version being the planned minor release following the 5
> >> year mark.
> >
> > Seems reasonable to me.  Maybe s/planned/scheduled/ for clarity.
>
> So that would mean that if the EOL month is September and the next minor
> release is scheduled for November, but we do an unplanned release in
> October, we would then have to still support it until November?  Or if
> we skip the November release, we have to keep going until February?

Practically speaking, we would almost certainly either decide that the
issue causing us to consider an October release can wait until November,
or we would accept that it's important enough that we do an October
release and then still do a November release anyway.

That's what we did the last time around and it seems quite unlikely to
me that we're going to just entirely skip a release in the future, given
our published schedule.  Should we ultimately decide to do that, we're
already going to be changing what we've published as a schedule and so
changing the schedule for EOL for that major version isn't all that
different anyway.

> I think a bit of ambiguity is good here.  After the EOL month, you're on
> your own.  We might do something afterwards for technical or bookkeeping
> reasons or because we think it's important, but don't count on it.
> Maybe in five years we'll be releasing a minor every three weeks, how do
> we adjust the policy then?  Let's not over-specify this.

I don't agree that ambiguity here is good, nor do I buy the argument
that we should keep it ambiguous because we might change things in the
future.  If and when we change things in the future, I'd expect us to
also be adjusting the EOL schedule, which seems entirely reasonable.
Right now we're in a situation where we changed one and not the other,
and that's causing confusion.  Let's correct that by making them both
explicit and clear.

Thanks!

Stephen