Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Tip #21 (Approved): Dropping support for PG 7.2 in OpenACS 5.0 release

Are there any strong reasons to keep support for PG 7.2 in the 5.0 release? I'm working on the upgrade scripts now, and since PG 7.2 doesn't support dropping of columns I'm having a bit of a hard time. It seems I shouldn't be dropping and re-creating a table like apm_packages to get rid of the enabled_p column (since this will drop constraints on the table). On the other hand, leaving the upgraded database in a different state from the one installed from scratch also makes me feel very uncomfortable.

Another problem I had with 7.2 was with the users table where we would like to have a not null constraint on username. However, PG 7.2 does not support adding not null constraints so I'm not sure how to achieve this.

I propose we drop PG 7.2 support in the 5.0 release.

.

Thus far we've always promised support for the last as well as current major PG version when possible.

While 7.2 doesn't support dropping of a column, it does allow renaming to something like "__deleted_1__" which is what I've done in dynamic code in ACS 3.x that expected to be able to drop a column (7.3 drops by doing the same internally and perhaps NULLing the data, too).

And PG 7.2->7.3 involves the 32 character name to 64 character name change problem, doesn't it?  Making upgrading painful?

If we do drop support and I'm remembering right we may want our documentation to suggest upgraders compile 7.3 with the old 32 character variable limit.

I'm not vetoing so by TIP rules I guess this is accepted but I'd like to see more comments by folks before we proceed.

I'll post a pointer to this in the regular openacs forum since this impacts our user developer community more than our core development community ...

Approve (and can we change the status to approve, if I'm not mistaken it is by the TIP rules).

7.4 is in the doorsteps, so if we support 7.3 and 7.4 we should be fine. I talked to the postgres guys on the linuxworldexpo and they said, they did not change that much (at least not in a way that would require us to unsupport 7.4).

Approve