On Fri, 2 May 2008 15:48:13 -0400 Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 09:18:39AM -0700, Rob Wultsch wrote:
> > Not really Postgres's problem, but for whatever its worth if I do the
> > following on Debian stable:
> > $apt-get install postgresql
> >
> > I get 7.4 . When I install Debian I generally expect the software to
> > be supported for a long time. Perhaps it might make sense to declare
> > it dead except for security issues?
>
> I suspect this really is the Debian package maintainer's problem.
> Debian itself has a very high bar for changes after feature freeze.
> This is great from the point of view of stability, but I hope they (or
> their users) aren't expecting the coommunities producing the software
> to do their maintenance of old releases for them. Postgres is way
> better in that respect than some of the included software.
That's true. I heard some stories about updating Firefox (or was it
still Mozilla?) and changing version numbers in Debian. That was because
the Mozilla guys seem to stop maintaining older versions the time a new
minor version is released.
With an upstream like that, you have a really hard time to support a
package for the distribution lifetime - and things get worse if newer
releases contain bugfixes which cannot ported back to the version
used in the distribution.
> (I confess I am a little astonished that the most recent stable
> release ended up with 7.4. I thought that at _least_ 8.0 was out
> prior to freeze. What happened?)
It was, i think ... but after feature freeze for Debian 3.1 it took
several month for the final release. Maybe the just released 8.0 was
"too new" for the feature freeze. Finally they ended up with 7.4 for
a very long time (before Debian 4.0 was released).
Bye
--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group