Robert Haas wrote:
> > Interesting. ?You could argue that once 8.3 is our earliest supported
> > release that we could even shrink the support window because the
> > argument "I can't dump/reload my data" would be gone.
>
> Personally, I think the support window is on the borderline of being
> too short already. There are several Linux distributions out there
> that offer 5-year support for certain releases. Even assuming they
> incorporate the latest version of PostgreSQL at the time they wrap the
> final release, it'll already be some months since we released that
> version, and that means we'll stop supporting that version of
> PostgreSQL before they stop supporting that release. I regularly have
> systems that run for 3 or 4 years without needing to be reinstalled,
> and they're not necessarily running the bleeding-edge version of
> PostgreSQL when first installed. So they, too, are on the trailing
> edge of our support. As much as I believe that 9.0 (and, now, 9.1)
> are the future and people should move to them, we can't enforce that.
> EOL doesn't necessarily drive people to move. If they're just running
> "yum update" they're going to get 8.whatever.latest, and that's out of
> support and missing relevant bug fixes, then it is. I haven't run
> into much 8.1 recently, but it seems there is still a decent chunk of
> 8.2 out there.
I agree we don't want to shorten the window --- I was just pointing out
that we have more upgrade options than in the past. One big push for
shortening was the Win32 issues on 8.0 and perhaps 8.1 that were
unfixable, which helped push retiring, at least on that platforms, and
once you retire on one platform, there is momentum to retire all
platforms for that release.
With Win32 stable on 8.2, we could say we don't need to shorten the
window as much, but pg_upgrade would allow us to keep it the same as now
because upgrades are potentially easier.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +