Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
Hi there!
MySQL AB (the company behind our most used database) has announced a change in support options for their database products.
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/mysql_lifecycle_policy.pdf
According to this document, the active support for MySQL 3.23 will end at the last of this month (ie on two weeks) and the extended support will end on the end of this year.
I therefore propose that we formally drop support of MySQL 3 as of Drupal 4.8 which will appear later this year.
MySQl 4.0's active support will end the last of September, we could consider dropping support for it too. Extended support will run until the end of 2008.
Dropping both MySQL 3 and 4.0 would enable us to rewrite some parts of our SQL queries. The extend of this would need to be researched.
I know that people will argue with "but there are so many ISPs that still run 3.23". ISPs that still run 3.23 after it has been retired by the supporting company are probably not worth the money you them.
A lot of service providers run Debian, which has recently dropped security support for the old stable (woody) distribution that shipped with MySQL 3.23. http://www.debian.org/News/2006/20060601 The current stable (sarge) distribution has been released for about a year now, includes both MySQL 4.0 and 4.1, and support for this release will probably continue for a couple of years (depending on when etch is released)