Re: PostgreSQL release cycles and LedgerSMB 1.3

["Adam Thompson" <..hidden..>]

> LedgerSMB 1.3 officially was written with the idea that it would require
> PostgreSQL 8.1 or higher.  8.1 is effectively end-of-lifed in the sense 
> that
> new updates, including security updates, are no longer available from
> the project web site.  Some vendors (such as Red Hat) continue to supply
> patches for older versions, but my feeling is that we can't really count 
> on
> this and so it's better to at least recommend updating.  However when
> PostgreSQL 9.1 ships, it is likely that 8.2 will be end-of-lifed.in the 
> same
> way.  Since it is likely that this will happen in the near future, 
> whether
> before or after the release of 1.3, I am going to assume that it takes 
> less
> effort to issue a release document which specifies a requirement of 8.3
> than it does to support
> 8.2 for a short period of time.  This also ought to help with things 
> like full
> text searching since there was a shift between 8.2 and 8.3 in that 
> regard.
>
> Any questions or concerns?

Any new installation of LSMB would, presumably, also occur on a new OS. 
Upgrades are a different problem, of course.  The two most conservative 
OSes/distros are generally Debian and Red Hat.  Red Hat (and CentOS, SL, 
etc.) defaults to Pg8.1 for the package name "postgres", but also supply 
Pg8.4 under the package name "postgres84".
Were it not for that, I would argue that you should only support >= Pg9.0. 
However, given that RHEL5.x is still considered a mainstream, viable 
system, and continues to be installed anew (I did one last week) it's a 
useful benchmark.
I don't know what Debian or RHEL6 provide.
-Adam