Re: [CORE] EOL for 7.4?

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> wrote:
> Mark wrote:
>> Doesn't mean that packagers have to make new packages ... I personally
>> think new packages shouldn't be made for anything older then *maybe* 3
>> releases (8.2, 8.3 and 8.4), but even that I think tends to be a bit
>> excessive ... but doing source tar balls is easy enough ...
>
> Andrew wrote:
>> But the issue for me is not what vendors support but how often we ask
>> someone to upgrade if they want to stay on a community supported base.
>> As I remarked before, other things being equal, I think five years is a
>> reasonable interval, and given that many users don't upgrade right on a
>> .0 release, I think a release lifetime of about six years is therefore
>> about right as a target.
>
> All of this ignores a huge reason why we have an implicit obligation to
> support past releases for a long time: our horrible lack of an upgrade
> option. That's only now starting to get remedied somewhat with pg_migrator,
> Bucardo, and Slony, but the default way is still to do a dump-and-restore.
> Until we can make this process take minutes instead of days for large databases,
> people are going to end up stuck to what version they are on. Knowing
> they are going to have to do it all over again later is not going to
> be very confidence inspiring.
>
> Again, to emphasize: many people are using 7.4, or 8.0, or 8.1, not because
> they necessarily want to, but they can't easily afford the downtime to
> upgrade. Cutting them off arbitrarily early won't win us any friends. Once
> pg_migrator (or better, in-place upgrades) is working well, we can start setting
> EOL on versions based on number of years of some other criteria.

At the moment it doesn't seem likely that pg_migrator is *ever* going
to support upgrading from 7.4 or 8.0 or 8.1 to any later version.

I'm not saying that's good, but nobody's expressed much interest in
making in-place upgrade work even from an 8.2 base, let alone any
older version. For that matter, there's been no concerted effort to
resolve the limitations of the 8.3 -> 8.4 upgrade. It isn't
technically impossible for the 8.3 -> 8.5 path to be smoother than the
current 8.3 -> 8.4 path, but nobody seems excited about working on it.

...Robert