On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:56:14PM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> Debian packages PostgreSQL in a fashion unique to it; it's arguable
> whether it's better or not (I don't like it), but going with that will
> assure your installation is a bit non-standard compared with most Linux
> installas. The main reasons you'd pick Debian are either that you like
> that scheme (which tries to provide some structure to running multiple
> clusters on one box), or that you plan to rely heavily on community
> packages that don't come with the Redhat distributions and therefore would
> appreciate how easy it is to use apt-get against the large Debian software
> repository.
Just to add to this: As far as I understand it, this scheme was originally
mainly put in place to allow multiple _versions_ of Postgres to be installed
alongside each other, for smoother upgrades. (There's a command that does all
the details of running first pg_dumpall for the users and groups, then the
new pg_dump with -Fc to get all data and LOBs over, then some hand-fixing to
change explicit paths to $libdir, etc...)
Of course, you lose all that if you need a newer Postgres version than the OS
provides. (Martin Pitt, the Debian/Ubuntu maintainer of Postgres -- the
packaging in Debian and Ubuntu is the same, sans version differences -- makes
his own backported packages of the newest Postgres to Debian stable; it's up
to you if you'd trust that or not.)
/* Steinar */
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Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/
