[postgis-devel] Can we put back GEOS 3.5 support in 3.0?

[Darafei "Komяpa" Praliaskouski]

I believe that not upgrading GEOS is self supporting problem.

Nobody cares about GEOS, as nobody uses GEOS directly. They use PostGIS,
QGIS, or whatevergis that uses GEOS. The only reason to pull a new version
is if something can't work with older.

If we, PostGIS developers, are affected by the same plague, we basically
can't ever close a ticket in PostGIS GEOS milestone - we're supporting old
versions, so you can still get your PostGIS with the bug manifesting
itself. A recent case is someone showing on PostGIS IRC asking why
ST_Subdivide won't work as expected in their 2.4.latest and the issue was
they used unpatched GEOS.

This is much like lwgeom split up. GEOS is half of postgis, the half that
actually does the maths, has a dev team from almost the same people.
Imagine we split up liblwgeom into separate repo and many people will start
not updating it and asking us to support older version, as their whatever
asked to not update. This is much what we have with GEOS now, just only
that historically it wasn't merged.

We didn't have a release of GEOS for a lot of time for the same reason:
nobody cares about GEOS. Either we start caring, or we should drop
supporting it as mandatory thing and rewrite its algorithms into liblwgeom,
as it's at least supported.


On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 4:28 PM Regina Obe <lr at pcorp.us> wrote:

> I know I was the one that took it out.  I had taken it out with the
> assumption we'd skip PostgreSQL 12 cycle and do a 2 year run.
> But it sounds like there will be some nice things we can leverage in
> PostgreSQL 12, so would be pity to miss that.
>
> I also hadn't counted on Gittie and Fuzzie complaining.
>
> So debating between the effort to fix Gittie and Fuzzie or put back GEOS
> 3.5, and the thought that others might be in the Gittie / Fuzzie boat,
> I'd much prefer living with GEOS 3.5 a year longer.  It would be one less
> reason for people not to upgrade to 3.0, and I want people upgrading to
> PostGIS 3.0  more than I want them getting off old GEOS.
>
> I'll even do the leg work of putting back GEOS 3.5 support.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
> Regina
>
> _______________________________________________
> postgis-devel mailing list
> postgis-devel at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/postgis-devel



-- 
Darafei Praliaskouski
Support me: http://patreon.com/komzpa
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/postgis-devel/attachments/20190123/1c03bca7/attachment.html>