[postgis-devel] What should be the minimum PostgreSQL version for 1.5

[Mark Cave-Ayland]

Paragon Corporation wrote:

> 1) We are introducing typmod for geography which will only be supported for
> PostgreSQL 8.3+
> 2) We really need to put costs in our functions, as I have updated Nicklas's
> bug ticket to reflect. http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/230
>  Yes we can conditionally put in 
> 
> logic to build costs in for 8.3 and leave them out for lower versions and
> yes its not that much code, but should we go for simplicity instead so we
> don't have to take it out when we move to PostGIS 2.0?

Looks like it will be 8.3 then ;)

> 3) I believe Steve Frost mentioned his new tiger requires 8.3+ at least for
> loading the data, not necessarily for using the functions.

Probably a secondary point to the above...

> 4) One less platform to test on and build for (except for bug fixes to older
> versions).  Besides the whole pgxs thing I think changed between 8.2 to 8.3
> which makes 8.2 more annoying to build for.

True.

> 5) The fact that I can do a set search_path on ST_Transform to get around my
> annoying problem my ST_Transform indexes not coming back after restore. Once
> we move to named schemas, this will probably become more important to
> specify search paths for our functions.

We can't complain about this, because we're the ones labelling our 
function incorrectly as IMMUTABLE :(

> Downside:
> 
> I suspect we do have a lot of users still running on 8.2, though hopefully
> that is quickly decreasing.  I suspect its probably under 20% of our
> population (but not sure how much higher or lower it is than that)

Well, if development of a feature as important as geography requires 8.3 
then that's what we have to go with I guess...

Maybe we need to come up with a PostgreSQL/PostGIS version matrix 
somewhere so users can easily look up the minimum version of PostgreSQL 
required for a given version of PostGIS?


ATB,

Mark.

-- 
Mark Cave-Ayland - Senior Technical Architect
PostgreSQL - PostGIS
Sirius Corporation plc - control through freedom
http://www.siriusit.co.uk
t: +44 870 608 0063