That's what we call throwing good money after bad. Besides, PostgreSQL has actually come a long way since 3 years ago or so. It's not a slow-moving project, especially for this space.
How often do developers recompile postgresql? How often do developers go through the hassle of upgrading databases versions? Whatever postgresql may have done recently, it won't be used and available in the common distro until a while later.
Bear in mind that minor versions in postgresql are breaking changes. It does not follow semver.
> Bear in mind that minor versions in postgresql are breaking changes. It does not follow semver.
1. This hasn't been true since three releases ago (i.e., PG 10).
2. Before PG10, X.Y _was_ the major version of PostgreSQL, Y was _not_ the minor version. It has never broken backwards compatibility without a major version change.
I don't know anyone who compiles their own Postgres at all.
AWS is a pretty common "distro" (of sorts). Postgres 12.2 was released 2020-02-13, and AWS RDS supported it on 2020-03-31. You don't have to wait very long to use this.
Uh, never? I mean, there may be cases where you might need to do that, but I don't want to use a PG built by JoeRandoMacbook somewhere. It's better to use PGDG.
> How often do developers go through the hassle of upgrading databases versions?
As often as they have to. Most places don't upgrade all that often.
I don't know what things are like in the RPM world, but for Debian each new PostgreSQL version is packaged at apt.postgresql.org as soon as it's released, by the same people, and to the same high standard, as the packages that go in the stable release.
(Also, since Postgresql 10 they changed the numbering scheme so that the major version changes for each 'breaking' release.)
Many of the cloud providers make it relatively easy to upgrade and might even force you to do so after a while (so they can drop support for old versions).
Bear in mind that minor versions in postgresql are breaking changes. It does not follow semver.