Thanks for those responses. Well in a fit of what I like to think was
professional courage (but which was probably more like simple lunacy) I
downloaded 7.4, read the install docs, typed "./configure" and "make" (very
exciting!), err..., downloaded GNU bison, typed "./configure" and "make"
(still exciting!), err..., downloaded GNU readline, typed "./configure" and
"make" (yawn!), typed "make install" (very exciting again!), and got
something that looked like a postgresql 7.4 installation in /usr/local.
Hurrah! This was fine, because the machine is running Mandrake 8.1, and the
pre-packaged postgresql is spread out in /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/lib, and
so on, so I didn't have to delete it.
A bit later and I was hacking away at /etc/rc.d/init.d/postgres, which at
least does run 7.4 when invoked from the command line, though I haven't
actually rebooted yet. The only minor annoyance was that psql, createdb,
pg_ctl and so on were binaries in /usr/bin, so I renamed them to *.bak and
linked to the ones in /usr/local/pgsql/bin -- I hope I've got them all, I
wouldn't want to be running a 7.1.2 (yes, not 7.1.3 as I thought) binary
against a 7.4 database...
Thanks for your encouragement,
Gerard.
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