Re: Thoughts on maintaining 7.3

On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 09:17:16AM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> >
> What if the feature does break compatibility with old features?
> What if it is "truly" a new feature?

There is _no_ mechanism in the community right now for testing all
these new features in the so-called stable tree.

I have lately been taking the position that Linux is only a
second-best choice for production use, precisely because of the
constant introduction of shiny new features in the supposed stable
branch.  Without using something like RHAS or Debian stable, I think
one is asking for trouble.  One needs to do a great deal of testing
on any new kernel release -- even a dot release -- just to be
reasonably confident that it won't eat filesystems, introduce some
new incompatibility, &c.  From my point of view, this is similar to
the position one is in with Windows: you need to quintuple-check
every security patch and hot fix, because it is as likely as not to
break something very badly.

One of the things I have always liked about PostgreSQL is that a
stable release really is stable.  Except for mighty serious, low risk
items, nothing gets backported to the stable releases.  If _you_ want
to back port things, go nuts: the source is there.  But the main
release does not get changed that way.

That's a good thing.  I happen to oversee one of those installations
you mentioned, where it costs us lots of money to upgrade.  If people
start adding features to the stable tree, it will cost me almost as
much to keep up with the small, important, must-be-applied fixes as
it would to upgrade.  Because I know those features won'r receive the
testing they really need, I'll have no choice but to hammer on them
all myself.  In the current situation, those happen infrequently
enough that I can do it.  But if one starts introducing all sorts of
extra features, I'll have to test _all_ of it.  Or start maintaining
a completely separate tree into which I put only the few patches I
want.

Why should everyone pay that cost for the sake of those people who
want to eat their cake and have it too?  If you want the new
features, you gotta pay the cost of the upgrade, or pay someone else
to support the new features for you.

A

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Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
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