Re: EOL for 7.4?

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Also, as Greg points out, 7.4 is just waiting for some exploit which is
> horribly hard to backpatch for us to desupport it on short notice, and
> that is NOT a service to our users.

That is along the line of my concerns as well. Based on a quick look
through my pgsql-bugs email, it seems that we don't get many bug
reports for 7.4 or even 8.0. Mostly, the fixes that are being
back-patched to 7.4 are problems that were found on (much) later
releases and happened to go all the way back. We are supporting 7.4
to the extent that the 7.4 code overlaps with the 8.4 code (soon, the
8.5 code), but are we supporting the code in 7.4 that IS NO LONGER IN
HEAD? I suspect we are to a point, but not really - and I don't
believe that the removed code is bug-free any more than I believe that
HEAD is bug-free.

I don't really object to supporting 7.4 on the grounds that it is a
lot of work. It obviously isn't, or the committers would have stopped
doing it before now. I'm more concerned about the perception that the
code is more supported than it really is. If we don't want to
actually EOL 7.4, then perhaps we should decide for which releases
we'd be willing to fix a major bug that affected only that release and
for which we would not, and then publish that information so that
users can make an informed decision.

...Robert