Re: State of support for back PG branches

Hi,

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

<snipped>
> This brings up the question of whether we should officially abandon
> support for 7.2 and/or later branches.  I don't think anyone is planning
> on supporting old branches forever, but when do we stop?
>
> I have a corporate need to keep supporting 7.3, at least to the extent
> of critical bug fixes, because Red Hat is still on the hook to support
> that version in RHEL3 for awhile longer.  I have no such interest in
> 7.2 (which is one reason I'm not excited about doing the extra work to
> back-patch the VACUUM/ctid fix).  I can definitely see that the
> community might not want to expend more effort on 7.3, though.  I have
> no idea what the needs of other distributions might be.

Doesn't Red Hat support RHEL 2.1, and so that PostgreSQL 7.1?

Anyway, IMHO PGDG should stop supporting 7.2 when 8.1 will be officially 
released. But at this point, (recalling the vacuum bug) it may "now" be 
time to abandon supporting 7.2.

Also, as the RPM maintainer of PGDG, it is hard to support 7.2 for us, 
too. Compiling 7.2 on newer platforms becomes a pain...

There are some 7.3 users around (I remember some on Slony lists, etc), 
therefore we should keep supporting it. But maybe we can announce that 
"7.3 will become unsupported after XXX time" so that people will know 
before we abandon the support. The best time for not supporting 7.3 might 
be when 8.2 will be released. However, I believe that 7.4 should live 
longer, since that's the last of the 7.X branch.

Regards,
--
Devrim GUNDUZ
Kivi Bilişim Teknolojileri - http://www.kivi.com.tr
devrim~gunduz.org, devrim~PostgreSQL.org, devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr                      http://www.gunduz.org