Tom Lane wrote:
> The "harm" is the developer time spent on doing so. Releasing back
> versions takes nontrivial effort (witness what it took to get 7.3.6
> out the door :-().
True; that said, much of this overhead is (IMHO) avoidable. There
should be little or no manual intervention needed in the release
process, so if the code in the REL7_1_STABLE branch is 'release
quality', there shouldn't be that much work needed to issue an
additional release.
But yes, I agree: developer time is finite, and we should focus most
of it on 7.4.x and 7.5
> Also, quite frankly, I don't want to encourage people to keep using
> such old releases. If they are installing on a new machine they should
> update to something newer and less buggy.
I agree, but there are some plausible uses for installing old releases
on new machines. For example, there are probably commercial or
unmaintained legacy applications that will only work smoothly with 7.1
(or some other old release). Similarly, an application developer may
wish to ensure that their application is portable among the most
recent 'x' Postgres releases, and want to install copies of them for
testing. Or a production environment may wish to install an identical
version of PG on all their machines, so they might be forced to run a
fairly old release on newly-purchased machines.
So I think there are legitimate, albeit somewhat obscure, reasons for
running an old release on a relatively modern system.
-Neil