Re: State of support for back PG branches

scrappy(at)postgresql(dot)org ("Marc G. Fournier") writes:
> On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Josh Berkus wrote:
>
>> Tom,
>>
>>> Or, as you say, we could take the viewpoint that there are commercial
>>> companies willing to take on the burden of supporting back releases, and
>>> the development community ought not spend its limited resources on doing
>>> that. I'm hesitant to push that idea very hard myself, because it would
>>> look too much like I'm pushing the interests of my employer Red Hat
>>> ... but certainly there's a reasonable case to be made there.
>>
>> Well, I think you know my opinion on this. Since there *are*
>> commercial companies available, I think we should use them to reduce
>> back-patching effort. I suggest that our policy should be: the
>> community will patch two old releases, and beyond that if it's
>> convenient, but no promises. In other words, when 8.1 comes out we'd
>> be telling 7.3 users "We'll be patching this only where we can apply
>> 7.4 patches. Otherwise, better get a support contract."
>>
>> Of course, a lot of this is up to individual initiative; if someone
>> fixes a patch so it applies back to 7.2, there's no reason not to
>> make it available. However, there's no reason *you* should make it a
>> priority.
>
> Agreed ... "if its convient/easy to back patch, cool ... but don't go
> out of your way to do it" ...

We're looking at Slony-I the same way.

The earliest version it ever did support was 7.3.4.

Some effort has had to go into making sure it continues to support
7.3.x, and, as of today's check-ins, there is *some* functionality
which is lost if you aren't running at least 7.4.

At some point, it will make sense to drop 7.3 support, but since
Slony-I has, as a common use-case, assisting to upgrade to newer
versions, I'm loathe to drop it arbitrarily.

One happy part of that is that it doesn't mean that 7.3 becomes
*totally* unsupported, as major releases such as 1.0.5 and 1.1.0 *do*
support it, and I wouldn't feel horribly badly if direct support
ceased in 1.2 as long as this left people with old databases the
option of using Slony-I 1.1 to upgrade from PG 7.3 to 8.1, at which
point they could get Newer, Better Slony-I 1.3 stuff via upgrading
just on the 8.1 instances.

Of course, there hasn't been anything *SO* substantial changed that it
has become tempting enough to drop 7.3 support. There have
occasionally been suggestions to add some 8.0-specific functionality;
when plenty of people are still using 7.4, that just doesn't tempt
:-).
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