Re: Upgrading rant. - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Ross J. Reedstrom
Subject Re: Upgrading rant.
Date
Msg-id 20030103004209.GA16819@wallace.ece.rice.edu
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Upgrading rant.  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 07:26:06PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Lamar Owen <lamar.owen@wgcr.org> writes:
> > replies I will rather quickly redirect to /dev/null, as it isn't Red Hat's 
> > fault we can't do a sane upgrade.
> 
> I think you're wasting your time trying to hold us to a higher standard
> of backwards-compatibility than is maintained by the OSes and tools we
> must sit on top of.

Case in point: even though the Debian upgrade scripts have occasionally
given me a near-heart attack by claiming that they didn't succcessfully
upgrade when they did, I've never had this problem. Is this because
Oliver is smarter than you? Or Debian is 'superior'? No, it's because
_incremental upgradability_ is _the_ design goal for the Debian
distribution. Lots of other stuff may work better on RedHat (auto
hardware detection, etc.) but this is the design case for Debian, so
the facilities are mostly there for Oliver to use to do incremental,
rollbackable, upgrades.

What does that mean for PostgreSQL? Perhaps Tom's right: you can't fix
it in the program if the underlying system doesn't support it.

Ross


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