Re: Patent issues and 8.1

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> So if we have to address it we call it 8.0.7 or something. My point is
> that we don't need to address it until we actually find out the patent
> is being enforced against someone, and that possibility is quite unlikely.

IMHO, the patent issue is *not* a "potential problem" for a lot of
people, it *is* a problem -- it makes people uncomfortable to be
deploying software that they know might cause them legal headaches down
the line. It also makes life difficult for people distributing
commercial versions of PostgreSQL.

I've posted a patch to -patches that replaces ARC with LRU. The patch is
stable -- I'll post some code cleanup for it tomorrow, but I've yet to
find any bugs despite a fair bit of testing. The patch also reverts the
code to being quite close to 7.4, which is another reason to have some
confidence in its correctness.

I think the best solution is to replace ARC with LRU in 8.0.1 or 8.0.2,
and develop a better replacement policy during the 8.1 development cycle.

-Neil