[Server-devel] PostgreSQL mgmt on Fedora: pg_cluster-like tools?

[Tom Lane]

"Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> writes:
> 2008/9/12 Devrim GÜNDÜZ <devrim at gunduz.org>:
>> * Upstream never ever gives such a guarantee that all apps will work on
>> every PostgreSQL version. For example, some casts were removed in 8.3.

> Having been once the maintainer of the Pg compat layer in Moodle, I
> also have first-hand experience with this. When the casts removal was
> mentioned in pg-devel, who was there asking about backwards compat?

If you need 100% backwards compatibility, you keep using 8.2 (or
whichever).  That's why we keep maintaining back branches for so long.
If we were to try to keep 100% compatibility in new releases, our
ability to add new features would be crippled.  So I'm not about to
apologize for the fact that 8.3 exposed the brokenness of some broken
apps.

Anyway, Devrim is quite right that mere installation of an RPM cannot
execute any sort of database conversion.  The functionality would need
to be invoked sometime else.  That doesn't mean it has to be manual
though.  Could we put it in the start script, invoked by something like
"service postgresql upgrade"?  Exactly what does a conversion look like
in Debian's packaging, anyway?

			regards, tom lane