Re: PG20 Minimum Dependency Thread

Jacob Champion <jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 2:22 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> so it kind of doesn't
>> matter today whether we set N to 2 or 3.

> I think it still matters for impending decisions. For example, we're
> about to engineer how to backport a sliding window of Python across
> the sliding window of backbranch support. Shorter windows tie our
> hands less.

I dunno. One of the points of the allegedly-agreed-to policy
framework was

>>> 2) We don't remove support for OS versions in minor releases

A strict reading of that is that a released branch can't increase
its minimum required Python version.

Now maybe we can finesse that, like "you can build PL/Python and
associated contrib modules with Python >= X, but if you want to
run these optional tests, they require Python >= Y". Not sure
how comfortable I am with that. I definitely don't want to get
into a situation where we require buildfarm owners to have
Python >= Y installed, because then we will not have any testing
that proves we didn't break the other part. (So we'd need a
runtime check to skip these tests on too-old Python.)

In any case, if we do make such a decision, most likely we'd
use the same value of Y for all the active back branches.
So I think the value of N in the support policy really
only matters for future version-cutoff decisions.

regards, tom lane