Re: Maintenance Policy?

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> David E. Wheeler wrote:
>
>> Howdy Hackers,
>>
>> Is there a published maintenance policy somewhere? Something that says
>> for how long the project supports minor releases of PostgreSQL.
>>
>
> We don't have a published policy, but I believe an unofficial policy has
> been to support minor releases for about 5 years.
>

My recollection is that we don't have a maximum lifetime, but we do have
a minimum lifetime of about two release cycles, whic is in practice
about 2 to 2.5 years. Beyond that, we try to maintain the branches as
long as the effort is not too great. When the branches become
unmaintainable they are dropped.

>
>> For
>> example, does 7.4 still get bug fixes and minor releases? If not, how
>> does one know when support for a major version has been dropped?
>>
>
> Hmm, I thought we dropped support for 7.4 a while ago, and there's no
> download link for it on www.postgresql.org anymore. But looking at the
> CVS history, I see that others are still committing fixes to 7.4 branch.
>

Indeed we are :-) I don't recall any decision not to continue support
for 7.4, which is still quite solid, if a bit limited. (I had to help
rescue somebody who had been running 6.5 recently, so don't think people
aren't running extremely old branches.) If you're going to backpatch
something, going back a couple more branches is often not a great
difficulty, unless the code drift is large. Most backpatches are
relatively limited in scope. If there is something that is invasive and
difficult, that's a possible reason to drop support.

Most users don't want to be upgrading all the time, and I believe we
inspire some confidence in our user base by a) being quite conservative
about what we backpatch, and b) giving our stable branches quite long
lifetimes.

BTW, 7.4 is less than six years old. If we were going to impose an
arbitrary branch lifetime limit, I think five or six years is about right.

cheers

andrew