Eventually we'll probably drop 8i support for the core and our packages, and there may well be packages supplied by others that don't support 8i, which will be fine by me.
Our database checking code isn't very smart about versioning issues at
the moment. We choose not to tackle this in the beginning as we had a
lot of questions about the viability of the queryfile approach, hacking on the APM/bootstrap/install code to deal transparently with different RDBMS engines, etc.
So we took the position that we are supporting base versions of an RDBMS and assume upward capatibility. With Oracle, this means 8i of course, and we're dependent on 9i being upward compatible, i.e. adding
"coalesce" hasn't led to "nvl" being stripped out.
I would like to maintain this simplicity for the time being, at least until we get our first OpenACS 4.x release out and more experience with it in the real world. Adding support for different RDBMS versions would be centralized work, much as adding the skeleton to support multiple RDBMS versions was. So I'm not worried about delaying any such support causing a lot of extra work down the line, if we later decide we need it.
