Re: PG 7.3 is five years old today

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?
> >
> > I see that there are two or three minor bug fixes in the REL7_3_STABLE
> > branch since 7.3.20. Rather than just leaving those to rot, maybe the
> > actual policy should be "only one more update after 8.3 comes out".
>
> Well, I agree that it shouldn't be your responsibility to do that. We
> need to reduce the things you have to worry about to allow you to focus
> on later releases.
>
> One of the good things about open source is the ability for software to
> remain supported for many years longer than closed source software.
>
> Perhaps we should ask for volunteers to maintain that branch? If we had
> a maintenance release manager, then they can take responsibility for
> passing down any appropriate bug fixes. We could also create a new list
> for people discussing older releases, so we don't get pinged all the
> time.
>
> That way anybody with an application at older release levels can either
> step up to the plate or lose support.

+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. Saying one more
update after 8.3 is akin to giving a 1 month EOL notice; not friendly at all
imo. Set it for July 2008 and I think you have given plenty of notice (and
given the lack of back patches, should be too much of a burden in that time
either)

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter LAMP :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL