From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>
cc: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org>
Subject: Re: question regarding policy for patches to out-of-support branches
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Comments: In-reply-to Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>
	message dated "Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:07:40 -0400"
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Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:29:00 -0400
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Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com> writes:
> 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...).
> Is the policy written down somewhere, or is it only project lore? In 
> either case, what is the actual policy?

I believe our policy was set in this thread:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/2923349.1634942313%40sss.pgh.pa.us

and you're right that it hasn't really been memorialized anywhere
else.  I'm not sure where would be appropriate.  Anyway, what
I think the policy is:

* Out-of-support versions back to (currently) 9.2 are still to be
kept buildable on modern toolchains.

* Build failures, regression failures, and easily-fixable compiler
warnings are candidates for fixes.

* We aren't too excited about code that requires external dependencies
(e.g. libpython) though, because those can be moving targets.

* Under no circumstances back-patch anything that changes external
behavior, as the point of the exercise is to be able to test against
the actual behavior of the last releases of these branches.

			regards, tom lane