Re: Reports on obsolete Postgres versions

On 3/15/24 3:17 AM, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
>> On 14 Mar 2024, at 16:48, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
>> On 13.03.24 18:12, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
>>> I think "minor" is a better term since it contrasts with "major".  We
>>> don't actually supply patches to upgrade minor versions.
>>
>> There are potentially different adjectives that could apply to "version" and "release".
>>
>> The version numbers can be called major and minor, because that just describes their ordering and significance.
>>
>> But I do agree that "minor release" isn't quite as clear, because one could also interpret that as "a release, but a bit smaller this time". (Also might not translate well, since "minor" and "small" could translate to the same thing.)
> 
> Some of the user confusion likely stems from us using the same nomenclature as
> SemVer, but for different things.  SemVer has become very widely adopted, to
> the point where it's almost assumed by many, so maybe we need to explicitly
> state that we *don't* use SemVer (we don't mention that anywhere in the docs or
> on the website).

Semantic Versioning was definitely part of what led to my confusion
up-thread here. I was also mistaken in what I said up-thread about
MySQL, who also calls "5.7" the "major" version.


>> One could instead, for example, describe those as "maintenance releases":
> 
> That might indeed be a better name for what we provide.

The latest PostgreSQL news item uses the word "update" and seems pretty
well written in this area already (at least to me)

Also I just confirmed, the bug reporting form also seems well written:

"Make sure you are running the latest available minor release for your
major version before reporting a bug. The current list of supported
versions is 16.2, 15.6, 14.11, 13.14, 12.18."

This all looks good, but I do still agree that a gradual shift toward
saying "maintenance update" instead of "minor" might still promote more
clarity in the long run?

-Jeremy


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