Data loss: suggestions for handling
The latest upstream version of a package I've begun to maintain, IRM, has a
problem in that a portion of the data in the system (relating to software
and licence assignment) can't be upgraded along with the rest of the
database - the schema is totally different.
I've thought about it for a while, and I can't come up with any good way to
make the change. The best I've come up with so far is to put a question in
the postinst which warns the user and allows them to continue if they're
sure, or they can CTRL-C out and backup. If it's running in non-interactive
mode, the install aborts. I really want to make sure the user doesn't lose
all their data.
A couple of questions:
* Am I being too paranoid? Considering that this change will (hopefully) go
into Sarge, an upgrade could do very upleasant things to people's databases
automatically. Although I think that admins who blindly update across
stable releases are nuts, I'd prefer not to annoy a bunch of nuts admins if
I can avoid it. <g>
* Can anyone think of another way of handling this? I can think of a couple
of other ways:
- create an irm1.4 package, but that is, shall we say, ugly
in the extreme, and there's no possible reason to have two different
versions of IRM installed simultaneously, which is (IMO) the main
reason for package versions in the name.
- dump the old software tables and store the dump somewhere, giving
pointers to the dump in all sorts of useful places. But if I put it
somewhere temporary (/tmp), it might disappear before the admin
realises, and somewhere permanent will chew disk space.
I appreciate any comments or suggestions anyone has as to how I could
proceed.
- Matt
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