Re: State of support for back PG branches

> The question at hand is when are we willing to pull the plug
>completely and declare that even security holes and data-loss risks
>won't get fixed.
>  
>
It is definitely a sensitive issue because we (my community hat on) want 
to make sure
and not alienate people because we won't support a version for very long.

However most major projects do this to a degree. RedHat does not release 
fixes for
7.3 anymore for example. Although the fedora-legacy project does. I 
don't know if it
is affiliated with RedHat like Fedora is though.

>7.3 is the oldest version that I think is actually supportable, in that
>there are no known, unfixable security or data-loss risks.
>  
>
I would think that 7.3 would be security fixes and data loss fixes only. 
It will be 3 years
old in two months. In OSS terms that is quite a long time. This isn't 
like Windows where
you see a release every 5 years.
From a commercial perspective, I do have quite a few customers still on 
7.3. Frankly
I won't be able to get many of them to upgrade *until* the community 
deprecates 7.3.

>So another way we might approach this is that it's time to kill 7.2
>because we want to encourage people to get off it sooner not later, but
>7.3 and later still have an indefinite support lifespan ahead of them.
>  
>
Well from a community perspective that is definitely a very nice way to 
approach. Possibly
a sub community or pgFoundry project --- postgresql-legacy?

>In that mindset, we'd only pull the plug on a version when an
>identifiable reason to kill it emerges.  I'd still not commit to an
>infinite lifespan --- but we might be willing to support solid versions
>for as long as, say, five years.
>  
>
Five years is an awful long time in our community. We would in theory 
still be supporting
7.1. 7.1 was a great distro in comparison to 7.0. Although it did have 
the XID issue.

>Or, as you say, we could take the viewpoint that there are commercial
>companies willing to take on the burden of supporting back releases, and
>the development community ought not spend its limited resources on doing
>that.  I'm hesitant to push that idea very hard myself, because it would
>look too much like I'm pushing the interests of my employer Red Hat
>... but certainly there's a reasonable case to be made there.
>  
>
Well one way to look at it, is that by doing so the community is 
enabling a commercial opportunity
which in turn, could (and hopefully would) encourage said commercial 
entities to donate more
resources to the project.

Look at how much RedHat gives to Gnome, or Novell to mono.

I know it is not the community responsibility to ensure a commercial 
opportunity but it can't
hurt either.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

>            regards, tom lane
>  
>


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