Re: reindexing

On Wed, 27 Feb 2008, Lew wrote:

> One has only to look at how many organizations still use Oracle 8, or
> Java 1.3, for example, to see how conservative many shops are with
> respect to upgrades. I'm not saying they should be that conservative,
> but many organizations are and we must be ready to deal with that.

Companies that act so conversatively are already getting nailed by lack of
support in the public versions of software. For example, in 2007 DST was
moved around in the US for no good reason, requiring an update to the
Olson Timezone Database. If you're a Java user, and you're on 1.3, you
couldn't get that update unless you have a support contract--the free
version won't do it. (ref:
http://java.sun.com/javase/timezones/DST_faq.html ) Even there only a
small subset of platforms are supported. Getting older Oracle versions to
work there obviously requires the appropriate support contract to see the
Metalink update, and as I can tell only 8.1 was updated, people running
8.0 were left out.

If some big-iron shop who is so blind to security issues that they want to
keep 7.4 on life support, they certainly can find someone to deliver such
a support agreement on a contract basis. But they shouldn't expect the
public project to keep them afloat for free, and saying this project "must
be ready" to handle them is quite debatable. Given the limited resources
of the public volunteers here, supporting ancient versions is a drain it's
hard to justify outside the context of such a support agreement. Using
your own examples, Oracle and Sun sure don't, why should PostgreSQL?

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD