Joshua, et. al. Sorry for weighing in on this discussion so late; I've gotten behind on the Hackers digests, since there are some 90 messages a day.
I don't see anything wrong with the idea of maintaining a 7.3 tree for bug fixes and testing if /contrib modules can be backported. Heck, I'm pretty sure that tsearch, pgavd, and erserver already have 7.3 compatible downloads on Gborg. What I would resist is the idea that any contributors be distracted from work on new+improved features for 7.4 & 7.5 for this. That is, whoever maintains the 7.3 tree should be someone new, or someone who's not up to hacking new features, yet. Actually, this might be a great way for a new hacker to get up to speed on the PostgreSQL codebase. Comprehensive backward compatibility is the hobgoblin of commercial software development. I support one legal services database (Bruce knows who I mean) which after 10 years of development still sport the same ill-concieved and poorly normalized schema, which leads them to constant serious performance and scalability issues. Why? Because 80% of their customers still use 2-6 year old versions of their software, and thus their development team spends 75% or more of its time supporting old versions instead of creating new ones, and they're not allowed to re-structure the schema becuase that makes upgrades more costly. We don't want to go this way. So: yes to keeping a 7.3 tree; No to having Bruce, Tom, Joe, Neil, Sean, Peter, Alvero, Jan, or any other current major contributor bothered with it. (Hmmm ... don't we have even one woman on the contributors list? Geeks are us) -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster