"Marc G. Fournier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Tue, 13 Jul 2004, Lamar Owen wrote: >> But Tom's assertion is true. We have enough trouble getting patches >> rolled out; adding parallel branches is just begging for trouble, due to >> our relatively small resource size. Although, we probably have enough >> developers at this point to make it happen.
> Except, we already have parallel branches, else we'd never have made a > 7.4.x release ... The point though is that we expend only very minimal effort on maintaining the stable branches. We only back-patch bug fixes, and 99% of the time the patch is nearly verbatim the same change as we developed to fix the same problem in HEAD. If the code involved has changed enough that a significantly different fix would be required, most of the time we simply don't fix the stable branch. And we spend very nearly zero effort on QA for the stable branch --- there's certainly no significant push to get people to beta-test minor releases. If we did anything much in the way of back-porting features then the level of investment in this would have to rise greatly. In fact, if the proposal is to let people pick and choose which back-ported things they install, then we are not talking about just one stable version but 2^N stable versions for N options. We couldn't possibly test every combination. >> The BSD's release something like that, with CURRENT, TESTING, and STABLE, >> right? (I'm not a big BSD user...) Yeah, but they don't support mix-and-match feature sets. A back release has only one current version. We could certainly do something along that line if we had a few people willing to be "gatekeepers". We'd have to work harder at making the release generation process open and documented though. Right now there are plenty of steps that only you, Bruce, or Lamar (respectively) know how to do... regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs/FAQ.html