On 2025-10-25 10:39:35 -0400, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 25, 2025 at 10:21 AM Adrian Klaver <adrian.klaver@aklaver.com>
> wrote:
>
> On 10/24/25 21:50, David Rowley wrote:
> > Because people promote the .0 as not yet production-ready, it means
> > that fewer people bother testing with beta and RC versions. Lack of
> > beta testing is what causes .0 to contain more bugs than it otherwise
> > might, so my suggestion is that we should be encouraging people to run
> > beta and RC in their test environments to try to increase the
> > stability of .0 versions.
>
> Alright that I understand, though not necessarily agree with. I would
> say lack of testing has more to do with time/money management.
> Organizations don't want to spend either until: 1) They see the dust
> settle on what is going to end up in the release. 2) Whether there is
> anything interesting enough to invest both in moving to a new release.
> Maybe there is a compelling argument that can be made to get those
> organizations off the fence. I just don't what it is as you would have
> to convince them to spend time and money rather then just wait and let
> the community as a whole do the work.\
>
>
> Contractual requirements to not run EOL software are a strong motivator to
> migrate to newer versions of OS and RDBMS.
But not to test beta or RC versions. With PostgreSQL's 5 year maintenance
window there is plenty of time to test with final versions before doing
the upgrade. For example, if a company adopted a policy of waitig for
the x.2 release, then test for 6 months before upgrading there production
servers they would still get 4 years of production use out of that major
version before having to upgrade again.
Personally, I usually use the current version for new databases (so if
I started a new project right now I'd use 18.0), but I'm conservative
about upgrades (so I usually don't upgrade to a new major version until
EOL is near and if I still had a 13.x, I'd probably go for 17.6 instead of
18.0). I also admit that I test beta versions only very rarely (basically
only if there is a new feature I'm really excited about).
hjp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp@hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"
