Re: Thoughts on maintaining 7.3

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

>
> >With 7.4 I'm finding upgrading to be easier. I'll likely upgrade out
> >production servers to 7.4.0 when it comes out and wind up skipping 7.3
> >altogether.
> >
> >
>
> Sure but I talking about people who are running 7.3 and are happy with
> it. The reality is that for probably 95% of the people
> out there , there is no reason for 7.4. When you have existing system
> that works... why upgrade? That is one of the benefits
> of Open Source stuff, we no longer get force into un-needed upgrade cycles.

Agreed, we've been on 7.2 for a while now because it just works.
The regex substring introduced in 7.3 was a pretty cool feature, for
instance, that makes life easy.

> When you deal with the systems I do, the cost to a customer to migrate
> to 7.4 would be in the minimum of 10,000-20,000 dollars.
> They start to ask why were upgrading with those numbers.

then maybe they would be willing to donate some small amount each ($500 or
so) to pay for backporting issues. Since mostly what I'd want on an older
version would be bug / security fixes, that $500 should go a long way
towards backporting.

> That is not to say that 7.4 is not worth it from a technical sense but
> for my customers, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is a mantra and
> the reality is that 7.3 is not broke in their minds. There is
> limitations pg_dump/pg_restore has some issues, having to reindex the
> database
> (which 7.4 doesn't fix), vacuum (which 7.4 doesn't fix) but my customers
> accept them as that.

I was under the imporession that 7.4 removed the need to reindex caused by
monotonically increasing index keys, no?

> Your mileage may vary but I can only talk from my experience.

Yeah, I would rather have had more back porting to 7.2 because there were
tons of little improvements form 7.2 to 7.3 I could have used while
waiting for 7.4's improved pg_dumpall to come along.

Cheers:-)