[postgis-devel] [postgis-users] VOTE: Drop PostgreSQL 9.0 support at PostGIS 2.2

[Greg Troxel]

"Paragon Corporation" <lr at pcorp.us> writes:

> Not sure who the various package maintainers are.  From what I have
> seen, other distros only support one version of PostgreSQL for each
> version of PostGIS except for windows which we manage and we're
> thinking of dropping 9.0 installers for PostGIS 2.1 for windows before
> it comes out (except for binaries) just because few seem to be using
> 2.0 + 9.0 on windows gathering from the bug submitted by windows users
> so likely we'd be supporting a none existent or tiny user base for 2.1
> (on 9.0).

(I think package maintainer views are useful not because this is about
packaging work, but because the role of package maintainer is about
stewardship of user needs in terms of which versions are reasonable to
run, over a wide range of kinds of users with different concerns.)

For what it's worth, pkgsrc has quite a few postgresql versions.  The
latest quarterly stable branch has:

  8.3 8.4   9.0 9.1 9.2

And -current (and hence the upcoming on 7/1 2013Q@ branch) has dropped
8.3.

That's perhaps an excessive amount.  But a lot of people with a
postgresql installation seem to not want to upgrade across branches
often, mainly because it requires a db dump/restore.  I have a trac
system with 8.3.  On the other hand, dump/restore isn't really scary.

So I guess the question is to what extent are postgis users people with
regular databases that also have some geo content, vs. people who  have
a geo-specific database and really do want to keep upgrading postgresql
versions.  And of course vs spare time of postgis developers and those
people that don't want to upgrade volunteering to maintain compat for
older versions.

In pkgsrc, in theory postgis is available for every supported pgsql
version.

Perhaps a larger question is if you intend there to be only one postgis
version in use at a time.  Specifically, when 2.x is released (for x = 1
and 2), will it be reasonable for a packaging system to just update
postigs to 2.x, so that 2.(x-1) is no longer available?  That would be
good; it's awkward to maintain multiple versions, especially if they
need to be installed in parallel (not likely in this case).

In sum, if you're talking about a mid-2014 release of postgis 2.2, I
suspect 9.0 will be getting pretty close to being dropped from pkgsrc,
so you wouldn't be leaving out people who would have support anyway.
pkgsrc is trailing-edge about dropping, so that probably means others
have dropped 9.0 too, modulo the extreme long-term stable kinds of
releases.  But for those releases, people *want* old software, so they
can run old postgis.

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