[Pkg-postgresql-public] Postgres major version support policy on Debian

[Martin Pitt]

Markus Wanner [2008-10-07 20:08 +0200]:
> Okay. Looks like I'm rather trying to join the "official" packaging team 
> and bring Postgres 8.2 back alive on testing. We'll soon see how that 
> turns out.

That's in fact the option I have most trouble with. Reason is that
major upstream releases are roughly maintained for five years. All
packages in Lenny main will be supported for Lenny's lifetime, which
is in the order of 4 years (time to release plus, say, 3 years until
the next Debian release comes out, plus one year of "oldstable"
security/bug fix support).

However, postgresql-8.2 is already a little less than 2 years old,
which means that we will need to backport patches in Debian for over a
year. I think it will just barely work with supporting 8.1 in Etch and
8.3 in Lenny, but 8.2 will mean trouble. That's the primary reason
why I only want to support the latest version in a stable release. I
just can't commit to doing all that backporting work myself.

So a compromise I can live with is to put it back into unstable (or
even just experimental), but never let it propagate to testing. Then
backports.org can do mechanized backports of updates without being
tied to the long lifecycle of Lenny. Would that be an acceptable
compromise for all involved parties?

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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