On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > On Thursday, April 21, 2011 05:43:16 PM Robert Haas wrote: >> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Ross J. Reedstrom <reeds...@rice.edu> > wrote: >> > On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 11:16:45AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote: >> >> Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> >> > I agree. I am in favor of a shorter release cycle. >> >> I'm not. I don't think there is any demand among *users* (as opposed to >> >> developers) for more than one major PG release a year. It's hard enough >> >> to get people to migrate that often. >> > In fact, I predict that the observed behavior would be for even more end >> > users to start skipping releases. Some already do - it's common not to >> > upgrade unless there's a feature you really need, but for those who do >> > stay on the 'current' upgrade path, you'll lose some who can't afford to >> > spend more than one integration-testing round a year. >> Well, that aspect of the problem doesn't bother me, much. I don't >> really care whether people upgrade to each new release the moment it >> comes out anyway. >> Not to say that there aren't OTHER problems with the idea... > One could argue that its causing bad PR for postgres. I have seen several > parties planning to migrate away or not migrate to postgres because of > performance evaluations they made. With 7.4, 8.0 and 8.2. In 2010.
That's certainly true. It's clearly insane to benchmark with anything other than the latest major release - on any product - if you want to have any pretense of fairness. However, for users who have applications that work and perform acceptably, I don't think it benefits us to be too aggressive in trying to get them onto a later major release. If we wanted to do that, we could maintain back-branches for two years instead of five, but I don't think that would be doing anyone any favors. In fact, I've been wondering if we shouldn't consider extending the support window for 8.2 past the currently-planned December 2011. There seem to be quite a lot of people running that release precisely because the casting changes in 8.3 were so painful, and I think the incremental effort on our part to extend support for another year would be reasonably small. I guess the brunt of the work would actually fall on the packagers. It looks like we've done 5 point releases of 8.2.x in the last year, so presumably if we did decide to extend the EOL date by a year or so that's about how much incremental effort would be needed. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
