On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 12:24 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 11:54 AM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
>>> Fwiw I was considering proposing committing some patches for these old
>>> releases to make them easier to build. I would suggest creating a tag
>>> for a for this stable legacy version and limiting the commits to just:
>>>
>>> 1) Disabling warnings
>>> 2) Fixing bugs in the configure scripts that occur on more recent
>>> systems (version number parsing etc)
>>> 3) Backporting things like the variable-length array code that prevents building
>>> 4) Adding compiler options like -fwrapv
>
>> I'd support that. The reason why we remove branches from support is
>> so that we don't have to back-patch things to 10 or 15 branches when
>> we have a bug fix. But that doesn't mean that we should prohibit all
>> commits to those branches for any reason, and making it easier to test
>> backward-compatibility when we want to do that seems like a good
>> reason.
>
> Meh, I think that this will involve a great deal more work than it's
> worth. We deal with moving-target platforms *all the time*. New compiler
> optimizations break things, libraries such as OpenSSL whack things around,
> other libraries such as uuid-ossp stop getting maintained and become
> unusable on new platforms, bison decides to get stickier about comma
> placement, yadda yadda yadda. How much of that work are we going to
> back-port to dead branches? And to what extent is such effort going to be
> self-defeating because the branch no longer behaves as it did back in the
> day?
>
> If Greg wants to do this kind of work, he's got a commit bit. My position
> is that we have a limited support lifespan for a reason, and I'm not going
> to spend time on updating dead branches forever. To me, it's more useful
> to test them in place on contemporary platforms. We've certainly got
> enough old platforms laying about in the buildfarm and elsewhere.
I agree that it shouldn't be an expectation that committers in general
will do this, whether you or me or anyone else. However, I think that
if Greg or some other committer wants to volunteer their own time to
do some of it, that is fine.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
