Re: [CORE] EOL for 7.4?

Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>   
>> Some people consider the extended support and easy upgrades of the RHEL5 
>> versions valuable enough that they have a strong preference to use the 
>> version of PostgreSQL that ships with it.  Right now, when such people 
>> ask me about using 8.1 in that context, I tell them while it would be 
>> better if they ran something more recent, the performance of that 
>> version is reasonable and the bugs they might run into aren't that 
>> serious.  This is not the case at all for either 7.4 or 8.0, which have 
>> been completely indefensible as versions to consider deploying for quite 
>> some time already.
>>     
>
> Well, actually, if it's just "what will RH support", I just today got
> launch commit on this:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=489479
> which might change things a bit.  PG 8.1 will be *in* RHEL5 until 2014,
> but whether many people will still be using it is another question.
>
>             
>   

Having 8.4 available and supported in RHEL5 will be nice. Maybe it was 
spurred by the talk I gave on 8.4 a couple of weeks ago at RH HQ? (j/k). 
But the issue for me is not what vendors support but how often we ask 
someone to upgrade if they want to stay on a community supported base. 
As I remarked before, other things being equal, I think five years is a 
reasonable interval, and given that many users don't upgrade right on a 
.0 release, I think a release lifetime of about six years is therefore 
about right as a target.

cheers

andrew