Subject: question regarding policy for patches to out-of-support branches

From: Joe Conway <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2024 14:07:40 -0400

I was having a discussion regarding out-of-support branches and effort 
to keep them building, but could not for the life of me find any actual 
documented policy (although I distinctly remember that we do something...).

I did find fleeting references, for example:

8<-----------------------
commit c705646b751e08d584f6eeb098f1ed002aa7b11c
Author: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date:   2022-09-21 13:52:38 -0400

<snip>

     Per project policy, this is a candidate for back-patching into
     out-of-support branches: it suppresses annoying compiler warnings
     but changes no behavior.  Hence, back-patch all the way to 9.2.
8<-----------------------

and on its related thread:

8<-----------------------
However, I think that that would *not* be fit material for
back-patching into out-of-support branches, since our policy
for them is "no behavioral changes".
8<-----------------------

Is the policy written down somewhere, or is it only project lore? In 
either case, what is the actual policy?

Thanks,

--
Joe Conway
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com