Re: postgresql-8.2
Hi,
Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
mode=extremely_terse because of tight time schedule personally.
Understood, no problem. Thanks for your answer.
* Markus Wanner <markus@bluegap.ch> [2008-07-30 19:04:49 CEST]:
However, for Postgres there is no easy (enough) way of upgrading between
major versions (i.e. from 8.2 to 8.3).
man pg_clusterupgrade
Sorry, but pg_upgradecluster just doesn't cope well enough with most
extensions. There are good reasons for the Postgres project to not
provide such simple scripts themselves: they won't do the trick.
I know it provides hooks for extensions, but is there any extension
actually using these hooks, besides perhaps the mentioned PostGIS one
(I'm particularly missing all of the Postgres contrib modules)? And do
these scripts work reliably enough?
I've gone through enough troubles with many manual upgrades between
major versions in the past. With that experience, I greatly distrust a
(Debian specific) small script, claiming to do it all automatically.
Also consider that on a productive system of a significant size,
pg_upgradecluster would lead to an unacceptable downtime of several
hours, if not days or weeks.
For these two reasons, upgrading to a new Postgres major version is
often avoided. Note that the Postgres project is pretty good at
maintaining major version for quite a long time. For example, the oldest
supported major version currently is 7.4, which has been released almost
five years ago (Nov, 2003) [1].
I'm not able (and timely, willing) to track potential (security) issues
with packages that don't have a regular maintainer in the regular Debian
pool just for etch-backports, sorry. I won't though hold back anyone
else from doing so.
Okay, that's cool.
Much luck with it from my point, I hope you are willing to track
security issues for those in a timely manner and don't pass away after a
while? The latter is the main problem, it's not easy for someone else to
pick up such off-the-track packages.
Hm.. understood. On the other hand: providing up-to-date postgresql-8.2
packages cannot make the situation any worse than it is at the moment,
where people are tied to the latest 8.2.x version they happened to
download before it vanished from the servers. And providing
postgresql-8.2 packages certainly doesn't prevent anybody (who can and
wants) from upgrading to the newish postgresql-8.3 line.
I've compiled Postgres 8.2.9 packages for i386 yesterday, based on the
latest 8.2.6 sources which I've been able to find on the backports.org
repository. I plan to read the manuals about maintaining Debian
packages, but some help in reviewing and getting them on backports.org
would be greatly appreciated.
Regards
Markus Wanner
[1]: Postgres 7.4 release notes:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/static/release-7-4.html
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