Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> 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.
Keep in mind that at least some contributors are paid to do exactly that
long-term support (and if you've not heard, Red Hat is up to seven years
support on RHEL ...). So the work is going to get done, and if it
doesn't get committed to the community SCM, I'm not sure that really
helps anybody.
Although whether we do formal releases is a different question. Maybe
it would be sensible to continue patching an old branch but not bother
wrapping up release tarballs? But the incremental work to do one more
set of release notes and one more tarball build is not that large.
regards, tom lane