Re: Upgrading rant.

On Saturday 04 January 2003 21:12, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> I would recommend requiring users to do the schema dump before upgrading
> the binaries, so they'd do

Nice theory.  Won't work in RPM practice.  I can't require the user to do 
_anything_.  Due to the rules of RPM's, I can't even ask the user to do 
anything.  All I have been able to do is prevent the upgrade from happening 
-- but that has its cost, too, as then older library versions have to be held 
back just for PostgreSQL, taking up the hapless user's disk space.

While I _can_ version the binaries as Tom mentioned (and that I had thought 
about before), in an OS upgrade environment (where my RPMset lives more than 
by command line rpm invocation) I can't force the older set to be kept in a 
runnable form.  It is very possible that the supporting libc shared libraries 
will be removed by the OS upgrade -- the old binaries may not even run when 
it is critical that they do run.

In place post-binary-upgrade is the only way this is going to work properly in 
the environment I have to live with.  That's why dump/restore is such a pain, 
as Tom remembers.

If I can get older versions building again on newer systems, that will help 
buy some breathing room from my point of view.
-- 
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11