Re: State of support for back PG branches

Hi,

On Mon, 26 Sep 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

<snipped>
> This brings up the question of whether we should officially abandon
> support for 7.2 and/or later branches. I don't think anyone is planning
> on supporting old branches forever, but when do we stop?
>
> I have a corporate need to keep supporting 7.3, at least to the extent
> of critical bug fixes, because Red Hat is still on the hook to support
> that version in RHEL3 for awhile longer. I have no such interest in
> 7.2 (which is one reason I'm not excited about doing the extra work to
> back-patch the VACUUM/ctid fix). I can definitely see that the
> community might not want to expend more effort on 7.3, though. I have
> no idea what the needs of other distributions might be.

Doesn't Red Hat support RHEL 2.1, and so that PostgreSQL 7.1?

Anyway, IMHO PGDG should stop supporting 7.2 when 8.1 will be officially
released. But at this point, (recalling the vacuum bug) it may "now" be
time to abandon supporting 7.2.

Also, as the RPM maintainer of PGDG, it is hard to support 7.2 for us,
too. Compiling 7.2 on newer platforms becomes a pain...

There are some 7.3 users around (I remember some on Slony lists, etc),
therefore we should keep supporting it. But maybe we can announce that
"7.3 will become unsupported after XXX time" so that people will know
before we abandon the support. The best time for not supporting 7.3 might
be when 8.2 will be released. However, I believe that 7.4 should live
longer, since that's the last of the 7.X branch.

Regards,
--
Devrim GUNDUZ
Kivi Bilişim Teknolojileri - http://www.kivi.com.tr
devrim~gunduz.org, devrim~PostgreSQL.org, devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr
http://www.gunduz.org
>From pgsql-hackers-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org Mon Sep 26 19:27:51 2005
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Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:27:48 -0500
From: "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com>
To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Database file compatability
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If a database is created with a 64 bit version of initdb, would a 32bit
backend be able to talk to it? Likewise, would a backend compiled by a
different compiler be able to?

If there was some kind of incompatability, would the backend just refuse
to start, or would it start and start silently trashing data?
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461