All,
So I'm going to make a case in favor of EOL'ing 7.4. In fact, I'd be in
favor of doing so in, say, February after an announcement this month.
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. I can think of several here in SF
who have been "working on upgrade plans" for the past 3 years. An EOL
is what's needed to give them a kick in the pants.
The same goes for other OSS projects. There's quite a few random OSS
apps which were created on PG 7.4 and have never offered their users an
upgrade path (Gnuworld comes to mind). They need an EOL announcement to
get them motivated to upgrade.
This isn't just a matter of supporting these users; it's a matter of
what new developers think of Postgres. Programmers judge PG based on
the version they first encounter, and they often don't check to see if
later versions exist or what features they have.
We'd want to do a full publicity around this, including a "how do I
upgrade" page and an "what does EOL mean for an OSS project" page. If
this goes well, we could EOL 8.0 after 8.5 comes out, and thus decrease
our maintenance burden.
This will also create some favorable spin around how long we do keep
patching stuff ... how many other OSS projects batch-fix 5 years?
Also, as Greg points out, 7.4 is just waiting for some exploit which is
horribly hard to backpatch for us to desupport it on short notice, and
that is NOT a service to our users.
--Josh Berkus
