Do we really need a 7.4.22 release now?

Tom Lane wrote:

I went through the CVS logs to draft release notes, and found that the
list of patches applied to REL7_4_STABLE is a bit skimpy:
http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/release-7-4-22.html

One thing that ties into this is whether there ever will *be* another
7.4.x release. We haven't formally discussed an EOL date for 7.4,
but its fifth birthday will be 2008-11-17. I imagine we'd want to make
its final update release be after that date. If we do a release now,
the final update might be even skimpier than this one.

Comments?

IMO, we release 7.4.22 with the rest and it is also announced that as of
12-31-08 7.4.x is no more.

Joshua D. Drake

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:20 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

One thing that ties into this is whether there ever will *be* another
7.4.x release. We haven't formally discussed an EOL date for 7.4,
but its fifth birthday will be 2008-11-17. I imagine we'd want to make
its final update release be after that date. If we do a release now,
the final update might be even skimpier than this one.

I'd be in favour of EOL'ing it after a single final release late
November/December (or whenever we do 8.3.5).

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com

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Comments?

IMO, we release 7.4.22 with the rest and it is also announced that as of
12-31-08 7.4.x is no more.

I'm all for killing 7.4, but that's a rather short time frame, especially as
this is a busy time of year for many businesses. How about we make it further
in the future (perhaps 2009-07-01, six months into the next year), and announce
the change far and wide?

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200809180939
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

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Comments?

IMO, we release 7.4.22 with the rest and it is also announced that as of
12-31-08 7.4.x is no more.

I'm all for killing 7.4, but that's a rather short time frame, especially as
this is a busy time of year for many businesses. How about we make it further
in the future (perhaps 2009-07-01, six months into the next year), and announce
the change far and wide?

I believe a single quarter gap is plenty in consideration of the age. It
isn't like 7.4 isn't already really old. If this was 8.0 I would agree.

Joshua D. Drake

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

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

I'm all for killing 7.4, but that's a rather short time frame, especially as
this is a busy time of year for many businesses. How about we make it further
in the future (perhaps 2009-07-01, six months into the next year), and announce
the change far and wide?

I believe a single quarter gap is plenty in consideration of the age. It
isn't like 7.4 isn't already really old. If this was 8.0 I would agree.

The handwriting has been on the wall for 7.4 ever since we agreed that
7.3 would be EOL'd at five years...

I wasn't intending to start a discussion about how/when to EOL 7.4,
but since the thread has gone in that direction: my vote would be to
announce now (say, with the announcement of this set of releases) that
7.4 will be EOL'd with our first set of updates in 2009. That would
probably be the next update after this one, maybe two updates away
if we find any really serious bugs in the next month or two.

It's not like people have to stop using it the moment we do our
last release.

regards, tom lane

Tom Lane wrote:

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

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

I'm all for killing 7.4, but that's a rather short time frame, especially as
this is a busy time of year for many businesses. How about we make it further
in the future (perhaps 2009-07-01, six months into the next year), and announce
the change far and wide?

I believe a single quarter gap is plenty in consideration of the age. It
isn't like 7.4 isn't already really old. If this was 8.0 I would agree.

The handwriting has been on the wall for 7.4 ever since we agreed that
7.3 would be EOL'd at five years...

I wasn't intending to start a discussion about how/when to EOL 7.4,
but since the thread has gone in that direction: my vote would be to
announce now (say, with the announcement of this set of releases) that
7.4 will be EOL'd with our first set of updates in 2009. That would
probably be the next update after this one, maybe two updates away
if we find any really serious bugs in the next month or two.

While I agree with the principle, I think the people who care about such
things would need a date, and not just "whenever we do an update". This
could be Jan 2nd or Dec 29th for all they know.

I think it's better to set a date, and then we can push out a final 7.4
release on that day if there are any accumulated changes.

//Magnus

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The handwriting has been on the wall for 7.4 ever since we agreed that
7.3 would be EOL'd at five years...

"Handwriting on the wall" is entirely unrelated to an offical,
published end of life date.

It's not like people have to stop using it the moment we do our
last release.

No, but if we are going to stop releasing revisions with critical bugfixes,
it is important that people know well in advance and can plan a migration
to a supported version.

Frankly, the whole pg_dump mess is what keeps many people on older versions,
somtimes including 7.4.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200809181123
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

No, but if we are going to stop releasing revisions with critical bugfixes,
it is important that people know well in advance and can plan a migration
to a supported version.

Frankly, the whole pg_dump mess is what keeps many people on older versions,
somtimes including 7.4.

Sure but that was fixed, four years ago. At some point you recognize
laziness and ineptness over caution and responsibility.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 03:25:10PM -0000, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

Frankly, the whole pg_dump mess is what keeps many people on older versions,
somtimes including 7.4.

This isn't my experience. The reasons people stay on older releases
are manifold.

A
--
Andrew Sullivan
ajs@commandprompt.com
+1 503 667 4564 x104
http://www.commandprompt.com/

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Frankly, the whole pg_dump mess is what keeps many people on older versions,
somtimes including 7.4.

Sure but that was fixed, four years ago. At some point you recognize
laziness and ineptness over caution and responsibility.

I think you misunderstand my "mess". I'm referring to the fact that the only
way to upgrade between major versions is with pg_dump and reload, which
really, really sucks for large databases.

- From a business perspective, there has been no reason to go through the
pain and downtime of an upgrade, as long as the PG project is releasing
point revisions to the 7.4 branch. As I said, I'm all for getting people
off 7.4, but it needs to be done with a definite date, and December is
way too soon.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200809181205
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8
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Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

- From a business perspective, there has been no reason to go through the
pain and downtime of an upgrade, as long as the PG project is releasing
point revisions to the 7.4 branch. As I said, I'm all for getting people
off 7.4, but it needs to be done with a definite date, and December is
way too soon.

Specifying an EOL date does not stop people from continuing to run 7.4.
They can set their own time lines to get off the release. They can also
pay someone to update the back branch if it is that important to them.

December 31st is plenty of time. This isn't closed source where with the
big O says no more updates, you are completely hosed.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

Hi,

On Thu, 2008-09-18 at 09:20 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:

So I'm thinking that generating a 7.4.x tarball now would be mostly a
waste of server space, and we should leave these changes for the next
update cycle.

How much server space or CPU cycles are we talking about? I bet it is
less than the bytes we spent during this discussion. Only I will build
binaries for 7.4, and you'll push an update for RHEL.

My vote is announcing all releases together, including 7.4 .
--
Devrim GÜNDÜZ, RHCE
devrim~gunduz.org, devrim~PostgreSQL.org, devrim.gunduz~linux.org.tr
http://www.gunduz.org

On Sep 18, 2008, at 07:38, Tom Lane wrote:

I wasn't intending to start a discussion about how/when to EOL 7.4,
but since the thread has gone in that direction: my vote would be to
announce now (say, with the announcement of this set of releases) that
7.4 will be EOL'd with our first set of updates in 2009. That would
probably be the next update after this one, maybe two updates away
if we find any really serious bugs in the next month or two.

+1

Best,

David

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

Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:

- From a business perspective, there has been no reason to go through the
pain and downtime of an upgrade, as long as the PG project is releasing
point revisions to the 7.4 branch. As I said, I'm all for getting people
off 7.4, but it needs to be done with a definite date, and December is
way too soon.

Specifying an EOL date does not stop people from continuing to run 7.4.
They can set their own time lines to get off the release. They can also
pay someone to update the back branch if it is that important to them.

Yeah. What this is about is how long the *community* supports 7.4
(for free, and at the cost of time that might be better spent on
development).

Looking at the CVS logs makes it pretty obvious that we've been
effectively partially desupporting 7.4, and even 8.0 and 8.1 to some
extent, for awhile now. There have been numerous patches that were not
carried all the way back because they would have needed major revisions
for the older branches --- not because the problem didn't exist in some
form or other back then. The community hasn't got the interest or
resources to create such patches, much less to QA them to the level
where a person too conservative to move off an old branch would think
the patches were safe.

It's really past time to make it clear to all concerned that if they
want continued bug fixes for 7.4, they'd better start paying somebody
to do it.

regards, tom lane

"Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg@turnstep.com> writes:

From a business perspective, there has been no reason to go through the
pain and downtime of an upgrade, as long as the PG project is releasing
point revisions to the 7.4 branch. As I said, I'm all for getting people
off 7.4, but it needs to be done with a definite date, and December is
way too soon.

I don't understand this, as soon as we released 8.0 you could take that as
advance warning that 7.4 was going to be desupported someday. So in that sense
they've had four years warning that this time was coming. The fact that the
date wasn't set in stone doesn't change their decision-making process.

--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
Ask me about EnterpriseDB's On-Demand Production Tuning

Tom Lane wrote:

Yeah. What this is about is how long the *community* supports 7.4...

Perhaps the discussion should be more global (and ultimately save time
on having this discussion again in the future). Decide on the policy,
make official and make it obvious. The time I usually hear tossed around
is 5 years. This is the same support period that Ubuntu uses for the
long-term-support releases of their server version - the longest support
period they offer. As a user, 5 years seems a reasonable support period
for a core infrastructure component.

Whatever time-period is chosen, I would make it obvious in a variety of
places:

The versioning policy (add something like "Major releases are supported
through minor-release updates for a period of five years following
initial release." to http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning).

The FAQ (add an end-of-life FAQ):
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.FAQ.html

All release notes: I.e. for 7.4: "Release date: 2003-11-17 End-of-life
date: 2008-11-17", for 7.4.21: "Release date: 2008-06-12 End-of-life
date 2008-11-17"

Perhaps even as a comment at the start of the "installation" sections of
the manual: "It is recommended to use the most recent release... Major
releases are supported for..."

Cheers,
Steve

Steve Crawford wrote:

Tom Lane wrote:

Yeah. What this is about is how long the *community* supports 7.4...

Is there any way to poll the community and see how much people
in the community care about 7.4 community support?

It seems possible that most people with large important 7.4 systems
either (a) have commercial support contracts anyway or (b) are capable
of supporting it in-house, or (c) are secretly praying for an excuse
to upgrade anyway.

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 16:57:19 -0700
Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> wrote:

(c) are secretly praying for an excuse
to upgrade anyway.

heh

--
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It's really past time to make it clear to all concerned that if they
want continued bug fixes for 7.4, they'd better start paying somebody
to do it.

I agree with this 100%, my only issue is with the method and timing of
"making it clear". Until now, there has been zero indication from
the release notes, the website, or the community that 7.4 will be
soon unsupported. If we are going to announce that, we should be making
the announcement fair (e.g. not December 2008) and loud (e.g. -announce,
- -general, main page of postgresql.org, press release).

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200809191537
http://biglumber.com/x/web?pk=2529DF6AB8F79407E94445B4BC9B906714964AC8

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