Re: PG 7.3 is five years old today

On Nov 29, 2007 11:11 AM, Ron Mayer <rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> wrote:

> Robert Treat wrote:
> > On Tuesday 27 November 2007 15:07, Simon Riggs wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 14:02 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> >>> There has been some discussion of making a project policy of dropping
> >>> support for old releases after five years. Should we consider
> formally
> >>> instituting that?
> >>> ...
> >> Perhaps we should ask for volunteers to maintain that branch? ...
> >
> > +1 to see if anyone else wants to take over management of the branch. I
> also
> > think we should be a bit more generous on the EOL notice.
>
> One thing that could soften the blow is if the EOL notice mentions
> which commercial organizations will provide paid support for longer
> than the community does.
>
> I assume that's one of the benefits of going with the commercial
> support organizations?

I bet there's plenty. Perhaps calling it an EOL is a mistake since the
concept does not perfectly map between OSS and commercial software. I doubt
there are any plans to trim the 7.3 branch from CVS and I imagine that the
community will be happy to work with anyone who wishes to back-port patches,
up to and perhaps including rolling their patch into CVS. This is very
different from a traditional EOL. Perhaps "Switching over to passive / user
driven support" is a better way to phrase this? We can of course emphasize
the availability of commercial organizations that are willing to take over
"active" support for anyone willing to pay for it.

Do we have any numbers on the downloads of 7.3.x for the last few values of
x? That might be a good indicator of how many people are actually following
the upgrade path.

Andrew