[Pkg-postgresql-public] [GENERAL] Re: Postgres major version support policy on Debian

[Peter Eisentraut]

Magnus Hagander wrote:
> Not having followed the whole discussion here.. But if location is the
> only issue, we could perhaps provide a repository on the postgresql.org
> servers for this, in case Debian does not want it on their official ones?

It would be a fallacy to assume that space is the only problem.  Debian 
probably has more servers than PostgreSQL.

The problem is that quality package maintenance needs other 
infrastructure support.  There is a whole of host of things for package 
tracking, package search, bug tracking, transition tracking, maintainer 
tracking built around the packages hosted for example by Debian and 
Ubuntu, and other groups as well.  Sure you can just dump additional 
packages on some server, but then it doesn't really fit into the rest of 
the scheme.  And the problem is that this scheme defines certain buckets 
of packages such as stable, testing, unstable, volatile, backports, etc. 
that have relationships between them.  And unfortunately the maintenance 
model that Markus wants for postgresql-8.2 does not fit into any 
existing bucket yet.  So the proper fix would be defining a new bucket, 
which can probably be a very difficult task.  In the meantime, the other 
path would be lobbying for an exception for some of the other buckets, 
which is unlikely to be approved because a lot of the management is done 
automatically and therefore does not allow human-defined exceptions.  So 
the last choice then is doing maintenance on your own.