Upcoming PG re-releases

Tom Lane wrote:

We will
at the same time be making new dot-releases in the 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0
branches, principally to fix the SLRU race condition reported by Jim
Nasby and Robert Creager.

Was there a conclusion out of the recent discussion on EOL policy? The
consensus seemed to be something like: "We will maintain releases to the
best of our ability for at least 2 years plus 1 release cycle. After
that, support may be dropped at any time when maintenance becomes
difficult."

Have we actually officially stopped supporting the 7.2 series?

All this needs some announcement from the core trsam, IMNSHO - there has
been some confusion over it (e.g. I saw someone recently saying we had
stopped supporting the 7.3 series, which the above would seem to
indicate is not true).

cheers

andrew

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> writes:

Have we actually officially stopped supporting the 7.2 series?

Yeah, we have. It reached the "too difficult to support" point already
(the VACUUM/ctid bug back in August --- the patch used in the later
branches wouldn't apply at all, IIRC).

All this needs some announcement from the core trsam, IMNSHO - there has
been some confusion over it (e.g. I saw someone recently saying we had
stopped supporting the 7.3 series, which the above would seem to
indicate is not true).

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long while, because Red
Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a long way away yet.
The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3 releases before that. But
I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long as the patches are in our CVS we
may as well put out a release".

We hashed all this out in the pghackers list back in August, but I agree
there ought to be something about it on the website.

regards, tom lane

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:40, Tom Lane wrote:

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long while, because Red
Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a long way away yet.
The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3 releases before that. But
I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long as the patches are in our CVS we
may as well put out a release".

Yeah, thats one of the reasons I am skeptical about having official policies
on this type of thing. If Sun decided they wanted to maintain 7.2 and were
going to dedicate developers and testing for it, would we really turn that
away? OK, I don't really want to have this discussion again, but as of now I
think we are all agreed that 7.2 is unsupported.

We hashed all this out in the pghackers list back in August, but I agree
there ought to be something about it on the website.

We've been kicking it around but haven't moved much on this...

Marc, can you move the 7.2 branches in the FTP under the OLD directory?
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/

We need to do the same with 7.2 documentation, moving them into the Manual
Archive http://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/archive.html. We can also
change the caption on the main documentation page to note these are manuals
for the current supported versions.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

Done, as well as moved all but the last two of each version after ...

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Robert Treat wrote:

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:40, Tom Lane wrote:

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long while, because Red
Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a long way away yet.
The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3 releases before that. But
I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long as the patches are in our CVS we
may as well put out a release".

Yeah, thats one of the reasons I am skeptical about having official policies
on this type of thing. If Sun decided they wanted to maintain 7.2 and were
going to dedicate developers and testing for it, would we really turn that
away? OK, I don't really want to have this discussion again, but as of now I
think we are all agreed that 7.2 is unsupported.

We hashed all this out in the pghackers list back in August, but I agree
there ought to be something about it on the website.

We've been kicking it around but haven't moved much on this...

Marc, can you move the 7.2 branches in the FTP under the OLD directory?
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/

We need to do the same with 7.2 documentation, moving them into the Manual
Archive http://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/archive.html. We can also
change the caption on the main documentation page to note these are manuals
for the current supported versions.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

Someone suggested earlier that we should drop the binaries for
nonsupported versions completely from the ftp site. Thoughts on this?

If not, they should at least go into OLD as well. But personally, I'm
for dropping them completely. If you're on something that old (heck, we
have 7.0 binaries..), you can still build from source.

Speaking of which, any reason not to drop the 8.1 beta win32 binaries?

//Magnus

'k, moved it all into OLD as well ... haven't removed anything until more
opt in on this ... I do agree that if you really want that old, you can
build from scratch, but I'm also not the one that went to the trouble of
building the binaries :)

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Magnus Hagander wrote:

Someone suggested earlier that we should drop the binaries for
nonsupported versions completely from the ftp site. Thoughts on this?

If not, they should at least go into OLD as well. But personally, I'm
for dropping them completely. If you're on something that old (heck, we
have 7.0 binaries..), you can still build from source.

Speaking of which, any reason not to drop the 8.1 beta win32 binaries?

//Magnus

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-www-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Marc G. Fournier
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 7:31 PM
To: Robert Treat
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org; pgsql-www@postgresql.org;
Tom Lane; Andrew Dunstan
Subject: Re: [pgsql-www] [HACKERS] Upcoming PG re-releases

Done, as well as moved all but the last two of each version after ...

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Robert Treat wrote:

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:40, Tom Lane wrote:

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long

while, because

Red Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a

long way away yet.

The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3 releases

before that.

But I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long as the patches

are in our

CVS we may as well put out a release".

Yeah, thats one of the reasons I am skeptical about having official
policies on this type of thing. If Sun decided they wanted to
maintain 7.2 and were going to dedicate developers and

testing for it,

would we really turn that away? OK, I don't really want to

have this

discussion again, but as of now I think we are all agreed

that 7.2 is unsupported.

We hashed all this out in the pghackers list back in August, but I
agree there ought to be something about it on the website.

We've been kicking it around but haven't moved much on this...

Marc, can you move the 7.2 branches in the FTP under the

OLD directory?

http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/

We need to do the same with 7.2 documentation, moving them into the
Manual Archive

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/archive.html.

We can also change the caption on the main documentation

page to note

these are manuals for the current supported versions.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

---------------------------(end of
broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services
(http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy
ICQ: 7615664

---------------------------(end of
broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to
choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not
match

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 13:33, Magnus Hagander wrote:

Someone suggested earlier that we should drop the binaries for
nonsupported versions completely from the ftp site. Thoughts on this?

If not, they should at least go into OLD as well. But personally, I'm
for dropping them completely. If you're on something that old (heck, we
have 7.0 binaries..), you can still build from source.

I'm against the idea... the cost for us is minimal, and the hassle
involved in building from source is quite large.

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 13:39, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Magnus Hagander wrote:

Someone suggested earlier that we should drop the binaries for
nonsupported versions completely from the ftp site. Thoughts on this?

I'm for keeping them in some sort of archive for historical reasons. My feeling is that somewhere down the road this will be a big deal.

Robert Bernier

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com> writes:

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 17:31 -0500, Robert Bernier wrote:

I'm for keeping them in some sort of archive for historical reasons. My feeling is that somewhere down the road this will be a big deal.

We always have the CVS repo, so if we remove them... not big deal.

It's not necessarily that easy to rebuild old releases --- for instance,
modern versions of bison will spit up on our older grammar files, due to
carelessness about semicolons; and newer C compilers may complain about
things that older ones let pass, too.

Unless we're feeling short of disk space on the server, I'm for leaving
them there somewhere. But definitely mark them old and not-recommended.

regards, tom lane

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 17:31 -0500, Robert Bernier wrote:

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 13:39, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Magnus Hagander wrote:

Someone suggested earlier that we should drop the binaries for
nonsupported versions completely from the ftp site. Thoughts on this?

I'm for keeping them in some sort of archive for historical reasons. My feeling is that somewhere down the road this will be a big deal.

We always have the CVS repo, so if we remove them... not big deal.

Robert Bernier

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster

--
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.503.667.4564
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Co-Authors: PLphp, PLperl, ODBCng - http://www.commandprompt.com/

I have a COPY CSV weird thing I'll post in a minute...

Tom Lane wrote:

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 01:23:38PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:40, Tom Lane wrote:

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long while,
because Red Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a
long way away yet. The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3
releases before that. But I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long
as the patches are in our CVS we may as well put out a release".

Yeah, thats one of the reasons I am skeptical about having official
policies on this type of thing.

I see this as an excellent reason to draw a bright, sharp line between
what vendors support and what the community as a whole does,
especially where individual community members wear another hat.

If Sun decided they wanted to maintain 7.2 and were going to
dedicate developers and testing for it, would we really turn that
away?

If any company chooses to support versions that the community is no
longer supporting, that can be part of their value-add or more
properly, their headache. Making commitments on behalf of the
community--which will be held responsible for them no matter what
happens--based on what some company says it's going to do this week is
*extremely* ill-advised.

OK, I don't really want to have this discussion again, but as of now
I think we are all agreed that 7.2 is unsupported.

And it's good that we're making more definite moves to show that we no
longer support it :)

We hashed all this out in the pghackers list back in August, but I agree
there ought to be something about it on the website.

We've been kicking it around but haven't moved much on this...

Marc, can you move the 7.2 branches in the FTP under the OLD directory?
http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/

We need to do the same with 7.2 documentation, moving them into the Manual
Archive http://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/archive.html. We can also
change the caption on the main documentation page to note these are manuals
for the current supported versions.

Excellent :)

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david@fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778

Remember to vote!

Tom Lane said:

We hashed all this out in the pghackers list back in August, but I
agree there ought to be something about it on the website.

The reason I asked again is that, notwithstanding the recent discussion, I
have observed confusion about the matter (including Jan telling me he didn't
think there was any agreed policy).

cheers

andrew

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, David Fetter wrote:

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 01:23:38PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:40, Tom Lane wrote:

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long while,
because Red Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a
long way away yet. The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3
releases before that. But I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long
as the patches are in our CVS we may as well put out a release".

Yeah, thats one of the reasons I am skeptical about having official
policies on this type of thing.

I see this as an excellent reason to draw a bright, sharp line between
what vendors support and what the community as a whole does,
especially where individual community members wear another hat.

So, if Sun, SRA, Pervasive, Command Prompt, etc were to submit a patch for
v7.2, we'd refuse it? I think not ...

Will we accept/fix a bug report *for* v7.2, that is different ...

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664

I see this as an excellent reason to draw a bright, sharp line between
what vendors support and what the community as a whole does,
especially where individual community members wear another hat.

So, if Sun, SRA, Pervasive, Command Prompt, etc were to submit a patch
for v7.2, we'd refuse it? I think not ...

Oh but you should. The community has enough to worry about.

Joshua D. Drake

--
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. 1.503.667.4564
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Managed Services, Shared and Dedicated Hosting
Co-Authors: PLphp, PLperl - http://www.commandprompt.com/

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 11:56:33PM -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, David Fetter wrote:

On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 01:23:38PM -0500, Robert Treat wrote:

On Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:40, Tom Lane wrote:

Personally I expect to keep supporting 7.3 for a long while,
because Red Hat pays me to ;-) ... and the EOL date for RHEL3 is a
long way away yet. The PG community may stop bothering with 7.3
releases before that. But I think Marc and Bruce figure "as long
as the patches are in our CVS we may as well put out a release".

Yeah, thats one of the reasons I am skeptical about having official
policies on this type of thing.

I see this as an excellent reason to draw a bright, sharp line between
what vendors support and what the community as a whole does,
especially where individual community members wear another hat.

So, if Sun, SRA, Pervasive, Command Prompt, etc were to submit a patch for
v7.2, we'd refuse it?

That depends on what you mean by "refuse." Such a patch wouldn't
resurrect the original Postgres with POSTQUEL and cause us to support
it, and it won't cause us to start supporting PostgreSQL 7.2 again
either.

That said, there's a backports project on pgfoundry. We could see
about something like an "attic" project for such patches, etc. This
way, the community doesn't get albatrosses draped over its neck, and
the patches are available for those interested :)

Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david@fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 415 235 3778

Remember to vote!

Robert Treat wrote:

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 13:33, Magnus Hagander wrote:

Someone suggested earlier that we should drop the binaries for
nonsupported versions completely from the ftp site. Thoughts on this?

If not, they should at least go into OLD as well. But personally, I'm
for dropping them completely. If you're on something that old (heck, we
have 7.0 binaries..), you can still build from source.

I'm against the idea... the cost for us is minimal, and the hassle
involved in building from source is quite large.

I don't have a need for an old PG binary. But when I have needed really
old binaries it's always been in the middle of the night, in front of a
machine with a teletype terminal, in the dark, surrounded by wolves
while a timer ticks into the red... Locating the right versions of 17
different libraries and compiling from source is always my second choice.

If it's practical to keep them, I'd like to suggest doing so. If it's
not practical, could we have a where_to_find_old_versions.txt file and
open a project on sourceforge to keep them?

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd

--- Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> escreveu:

If it's practical to keep them, I'd like to suggest doing so. If it's
not practical, could we have a where_to_find_old_versions.txt file
and
open a project on sourceforge to keep them?

What about an museum.postgresql.org to keep the old releases?

Euler Taveira de Oliveira
euler[at]yahoo_com_br

_______________________________________________________
Yahoo! doce lar. Fa�a do Yahoo! sua homepage.
http://br.yahoo.com/homepageset.html

Am Donnerstag, 1. Dezember 2005 11:35 schrieb Euler Taveira de Oliveira:

What about an museum.postgresql.org to keep the old releases?

That gave me a good laugh, but there is something to be said about moving all
no longer supported releases (according to the criteria that are being
discussed) to an unmirrored site, say, archive.postgresql.org.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/