I would like to get the community’s opinion about supporting older (minor) versions of MySQL in open source projects.
If I were to develop some open source project, and a bug report came which only applied to MySQL 5.0.51 (but more recent versions worked fine), would I need to fix the code so as to support this older version?
How about supporting 5.0.22 (released almost 4 years ago, with almost 70 revisions since)? Would you expect an open source project to support this MySQL version because, say, this is the default version in your yum repository?
I would like to concentrate on the currently stable MySQL versions: 5.0 and 5.1. Versions 4.x are out of the question for me, and 5.5 is not yet GA.
Sure, it would be great to support everything. But also time and effort consuming. So, I would greatly appreciate your feedback!
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I’m the author of HeidiSQL and I still get (few) complaints from users of MySQL 4.0, 4.1 and even 3.2x releases. Latest related issue complaints about an error message on 4.x servers which don’t allow you to fire SHOW DATABASES if you don’t have the SHOW_DB priv. Most such issues don’t get a high personal priority by me. But if you ask if they should get supported at all I’d say yes, definitely. Only don’t give them a too high priority. Additionally, in nearly all situations there are release dependent IF’s and THEN’s and ELSE’s, also in the latest releases. If you read the MySQL manual, you will get a feeling for that – how often did you read “This statement was added in 5.1.foo, while it was behaving differently in 5.1.bar . So, HeidiSQL does it all by “if ServerVersion >= 50103 …” and has fallbacks for older versions.
Most “users” don’t know between release number. “Bigger is newer and better”. DBA’s either need a drop in replacement for the current release of the OS distribution. Redhat 5.4 is 5.0.77 at this writing. This is because they are using what the Sysadmin’s will install or, the current supported version from MySQL (Oracle) because they are paying for the “real thing”.
Why? – Are you thinking of a fork that would be the MySQL equivalent of CentOS?
@Mark,
No, nothing of the sort. I’m developing a toolkit and a monitoring utility for MySQL, and am encountering issues with older versions.