Upgrade issue (again).

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I am loathe to even bring this up, but with two messages today about it, I am 
going to be short and sweet:

We don't have a reasonable upgrade path.  ASCII dump->install 
new->initdb->restore is not a reasonable upgrade.  It is confusing to the 
newbie, and should be fixed.  We used to have an upgrade path in pg_upgrade 
- -- but it no longer works (but it was most definitely a fine effort for its 
time, Bruce!). Furthermore, the dump/restore cycle is a pain in the neck when 
tables get larger than a few hundred megabytes.  It's worse when the newer 
version won't properly restore from the old dump -- and you have to edit, 
potentially by hand, a multi-gigabyte dump to get it to restore.

A seamless binary upgrade utility will require Deep Knowledge -- of the kind 
that very few pgsql-hackers have.  Deeper knowledge than I have, that's for 
sure -- or I would have already done it.

I am not going to beat it into the ground this time -- I have argued the 
issue at length before (some would say for far too long! :-)).  But I am 
going to drop reminders as we get bug reports and compliants.  And Iwould 
remind the group that MySQL does this easily -- it has utilities to migrate 
between its different table types. 
- --
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11
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