Time to delete old PostgreSQL from MacPorts?

David Gilman davidgilman1 at gmail.com
Fri Jul 12 20:54:18 UTC 2024


Is there any opposition to dropping all unsupported PostgreSQL
versions from MacPorts? That would be any version of PostgreSQL before
12. Version 12 runs out of support later this year.

Right now none of the unsupported versions will build in MacPorts
without backporting patches[0]. I don't think it's impossible to get
them building again, the PostgreSQL codebase moves slowly and patches
can probably be made to apply, I just don't think the effort is
justified if there aren't any users on these old versions.

Note that psql and the client library (libpq) are backwards compatible
going back many versions. You can use newer versions of psql with
older databases. These ports are only useful if you need to run a
specific version of the PostgreSQL server itself.

[0] at least https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/400928b83bd254d20f0790d467f221bb52707e6e
but I'm sure there are more gotchas as you go further back.

-- 
David Gilman
:DG<


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