3.1 "Ascraeus" to drop support for PostgreSQL < 8.3

[Oleg]

PostgreSQL 8.1 and below have been end of lifed by postgres.

Necessity to support old versions of postgres makes it difficult to take advantage of performance and functionality improvements offered in later versions. An example of a performance improvement is here; for functionality, fulltext search may be easier to implement if we don't have to support 7.x.

We intend to make phpbb 3.1 require postgres 8.1 or better, or possibly 8.2 or better if the changes between 8.1 and 8.2 warrant it.

Debian lenny ships postgres 8.3; squeeze ships 8.4. RHEL/CentOS 5 ship 8.1.

[naderman]

+1

[nickvergessen]

How about dropping old MySQL versions aswell?

[igorw]

How about dropping old MySQL versions aswell?

Looking into that, same with sqlite2.

[Oleg]

How about dropping old MySQL versions aswell?

My impression is that due to supporting myisam we essentially stand no chance of using any 5.0+ specific features.

On the other hand I agree that finding (and thus using) old versions of mysql is extremely tricky, therefore I am not opposed to dropping support for mysql versions that oracle no longer makes available in their archives.

Nils promised us some statistics

[igorw]

Based on data from the ACP statistics module between 3.0.6 and now-ish, I have following results:

99% of the submitted entries use MySQL, which is 215999 boards. By version: 0.5% mysql4.0, 3.3% mysql4.1, 58.8% mysql5.0, 36% mysql5.1, 0.9% mysql 5.5.

0.1% of total use SQLite2. (we don't support SQLite3 yet)

Of course these stats are not perfect, but they should give an idea.

[Oleg]

If we don't use any mysql 5+ features I see no reason to actively drop support for 4.1. However I would support adding UI to the acp to inform board admins that they are running an old version of mysql, similarly to how php 5.2 was handled a while ago.

[naderman]

Yes we should certainly add that. I talked to Ruslan earlier about generally adding all our install-time checks to the ACP main page and warning the admin if anything is no longer compliant (we were discussing an mbstring related problem). So we should probably come up with a common solution for these things. We should still add this to 3.0 I think, so please talk to Ruslan about this.

[JHTech100]

Well,
I think sqlite 2 should be supported still. On my Mac, I run my home web server with MAMP and the only database type I have had success with is sqlite 2.8.17. I can't see from my average user perspective why it would hurt to just leave in the support. I don't want to be cut off after 3.0.8 or 3.0.9. I don't really have control over the databases that MAMP supports. MySQL has always failed when it comes to creating the tables.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I don't think the people who can only use sqlite 2 should be cut off. phpBB has a good distance to go.

[naderman]

Well I assume you have sqlite3 support as well, which phpBB 3.0.x doesn't support yet. So that should be a perfectly acceptable solution for you?