Re: Thoughts on maintaining 7.3 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 08:36, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> >   With the recent stint of pg_upgrade statements and the impending
> > release of 7.4 what do people think about having a dedicated maintenance
> > team for 7.3? 7.3 is a pretty solid release and I think people will be
> > hard pressed to upgrade to 7.4.  Of course a lot of people will, but I
> > have customer that are just now upgrading to 7.3 because of legacy
> > application and migratory issues.
> >
> >    Anyway I was considering a similar situation to how Linux works where
> > their is a maintainer for each release... Heck even Linux 2.0 still
> > released until recently.
> >
> >   Of course the theory being that we backport "some" features and fix
> > any bugs that we find?
> >
> >    What are people's thoughts on this?
> 
> The key issue here is that those creating the patches need to spend the
> time to create appropriate ones for v7.3, and not many seem willing ...
> Tom generally does alot of work on back-patching where appropriate, but
> those patches are generally either very critical, or benign to changes
> since v7.3 ...
> 
> The main detractor from us doing this up to this point has been, I
> believe, testing to make sure any back patches don't break *any* of the
> various OS ports, testing that generally only gets done while in a Beta
> freeze ...
> 
> Not saying that if someone submit'd patches to v7.3, they wouldn't get
> applied ... only that, to date, the work/effort has been greater then the
> overall benefit, and nobody has step'd up to the plate to do it ...

Maybe I've mis-read Joshua's intentions, but I got the impression that
this 7.3 maintainer would follow the patches list and backport patches
whenever possible. This way folks coding for 7.4/7.5 can stay focused on
that, but folks who can't upgrade to 7.4 for whatever reason can still
get some features / improvements. 

Several linux distros already do this for many packages, and personally
I've always been surprised that, given postgresql's major release
upgrade issues, that no commercial company has stepped in to offer this
in the past. I think what Joshua is wondering is how much cooperation
would he get from the community if he was willing to donate these
efforts back into project.

While your concerns about testing are valid, there are already issues
with that for minor releases, as evidenced by our need to do the quick
7.3.4 after trouble in 7.3.3. Not to mention how little testing is
happening to the code that's been back patched into 7.3 since 7.3.4...
Hmm... maybe thats actually an argument against having more changes get
put in, OTOH if Joshua can address the testing issues maybe there would
be an overall improvement.  

I personally think it's a good idea for *someone* to do this, but I'll
leave it to core to decide if they want to put the projects stamp of
approval on it for any official community release.

Robert Treat 
-- 
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