Re: Versions RSS page is missing version(s)

On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 15:33, Greg Sabino Mullane <greg(at)turnstep(dot)com> wrote:
>
>>> I'm not sure how useful that is. Surely while we encourage people to run
>>> a recent major version, we also want to encourage people who will not
>>> or cannot upgrade to at least be running the latest revision of a branch,
>>> no matter how old it is?
>
>> We don't support 7.3. Not even if you run the latest version.
>
> No, but I imagine we still would encourage people to run the latest revision
> of it. Come this time next year, I hope that we'll tell people on 7.4.2 to

Do we really, officially, care?

> upgrade to 9.0 as soon as possible, but to upgrade to 7.4.27 *immaediately*.

We should be, and afaik are, telling people to upgrade away from 7.4
immidiately *already*.

>>> How about a compromise? We add a new field to that XML so we can state
>>> that it is unsupported, but leave it in there. That way, programs such
>>> as check_postgres can not only distinguish between old but valid versions
>>> and invalid versions (e.g. "7.typo.oops") but can act in a more intelligent
>>> way for unsupported versions. Heck, maybe an estimated end-of-life date
>>> field for all versions as well?
>
>> How do you add that field in a backwards compatible way? Meaning that
>> people or tools relying on it should *not* see 7.3 or 6.1 or whatever.
>> And it needs to be done within the RSS spec (which does allow custom
>> namespaces though, so that may not be a problem)
>
> Well I don't know what people are reading the XML, so let's discuss tools.
> Do you have a use case in mind where adding old versions would break something?

I don't know what tools people use. That's the point of using RSS,
people can use whatever tool they want.

> Has this always been advertised as a list of *supported* versions, or as a list
> of the *latest* revisions? I've always assumed the latter was more important
> that the former.

The *meaning* has always been supported versions, but if you read the
contents of the feed it does say latest.

Does anybody know if it's actually supported to have multiple channels
in one RSS feed? If it is, we could add a second channel with
unsupported versions, still listing the latest version of them.

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/