Re: Thoughts on maintaining 7.3

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 08:49:51AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> > I would argue _very strongly_ against backporting features.
>
> For massive features sure but an example of a feature that works
> very well and easily with 7.3 is the preloading of libs.

Then let people patch the stable releases themselves, or pay
companies to produce such mini-branches (and thereby pay the cost of
the necessary testing, &c.).

How does one know in advance which set of "working well and easily"
features can be back ported and be sure not to break on some release
of IRIX, Solaris, AIX, or SCO? Those are not platforms that get the
kind of kicking that Linux and FreeBSD do, but people are still
relying on the dot releases not to break anything on those platforms.
I think that Postgres has a tradition that, when a release is stable,
it's _stable, man_ -- a tradition that other software (commercial or not)
should emulate. I'd hate to see that go overboard in an attempt to
add features to the main releases.

A

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