Re: EOL for 7.4?

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The other Greg wrote:

> Realistically we're going to EOL it as soon as the first major bug is
> found that *doesn't* back patch readily. There's relatively low cost 
> to supporting it up until that bug is found, and apparently it hasn't
> been found it.                                                       

I hope this is not the case, for sane definitions of "readily". We have 
an implicit promise to support 7.4 until we state that we've stopped    
doing so. Stopping because a patch is hard seems a real crappy excuse.  
For the record, I'd like to see a year's notice. How about Dec. 1, 2010?
February is completely not reasonable. Companies need a lot more time to 
make plans, get approval, test, etc.

> 2) Relatively few people are using it so perhaps the reason we haven't
> found any major bugs recently is because nobody's pushing it hard any
> more.

Or maybe it's a relatively stable branch that people are happy with. As
far as "few people", where do you get that idea, except anecdotally? I
can assure I know of a number of companies that are using it (and some
using 7.3, but shame on them). These companies do not advertise their
usage of Postgres, and their use of the database stays the same so no
bugs are revealed, but they are out there.

Josh writes:
> The main reason I'm in favor of this is that we have a lot of users
> using 7.4 out of inertia, and they need a message that 7.4 is "not
> supported" to get them to upgrade.

That will get some, but not others. What really makes people upgrade
their database is when their database driver stops working against it. :)

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
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