Re: ICU 54 and earlier are too dangerous

On 14.03.23 01:26, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Unless someone has a better idea, I think we need to bump the minimum
>> required ICU version to 55. That would solve the issue in v16 and
>> later, but those using old versions of ICU and old versions of postgres
>> would still be vulnerable to these kinds of typos.
> ... that seems like an overreaction. We know from the buildfarm
> that there's still a lot of old ICU out there. Is it really improving
> anybody's life to try to forbid them from using such a version?

If I'm getting the dates right, the 10-year support of RHEL 7 will
expire in June 2024. So if we follow past practices, we could drop
support for RHEL 7 in PG17. This would allow us to drop support for old
libicu, and also old openssl, zlib, maybe more.

So if we don't feel like we need to do an emergency change here, there
is a path to do this in a principled way in the near future.