On 2021-Oct-24, Robert Haas wrote: > You know, one thing we could think about doing is patching some of the > older branches to make them compile on modern machines. That would not > only be potentially useful for people who are upgrading from ancient > versions, but also for hackers trying to do research on the origin of > bugs or performance problems, and also for people who are trying to > maintain some kind of backward compatibility or other and want to test > against old versions.
I think it is worth *some* effort, at least as far back as we want to claim that we maintain pg_dump and/or psql compatibility, assuming it is not too onerous. For instance, I wouldn't want to clutter buildfarm or CI dashboards with testing these branches, unless it is well isolated from regular ones; we shouldn't commit anything that's too invasive; and we shouldn't make any claims about supportability of these abandoned branches. As an example, I did backpatch one such fix to 8.3 (just over a year) and 8.2 (four years) after they had closed -- see d13f41d21538 and 105f3ef492ab. -- Álvaro Herrera 39°49'30"S 73°17'W — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/ "Puedes vivir sólo una vez, pero si lo haces bien, una vez es suficiente"
