Re: EOL for 7.4?

Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On Tue, 2009-11-03 at 12:29 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
>> You're
>> not going to take all those little dribs and drabs of responsibility
>> and transfer them to one person, or even one group of people.

> With respect to all the people you just mentioned, I don't see any
> reason why other people could not perform the duties you describe. Of
> course, it might require a little effort, as we might expect of any
> handover of responsibility.

It's not "handover of responsibility" that's the issue, it's that
dividing up existing responsibility entails more communication and
synchronization overhead. If we have a separate set of people
back-patching and releasing old branches, then every time we make a bug
fix, we have to explain the patch to them; every time we have a release,
we have to get their concurrence on release schedule. And we have to
track whether patches that should be back-patched have been. The added
overhead of all that would easily exceed the time savings of pushing off
the responsibility, IMO.

(As an example, it's already been determined among core and -packagers
that there will be no 8.4.2 during November, because we can't get
everyone's time to make a release this month. Putting even more
people in the loop does NOT make that better. And they can't be
out of the loop --- for instance, if it's a security update, 7.4.x
had better come out at the same time as the other branches.)

regards, tom lane