On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 6:23 PM, David Boreham
<david_list@boreham.org> wrote:
On 3/3/2012 7:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
[ raised eyebrow... ] As the person responsible for the packaging
you're dissing, I'd be interested to know exactly why you feel that
the Red Hat/CentOS PG packages "can never be trusted". Certainly they
tend to be from older release branches as a result of Red Hat's desire
to not break applications after a RHEL branch is released, but they're
not generally broken AFAIK.
I'm concerned about things like :
a) Picking a sufficiently recent version to get the benefit of performance optimizations, new features and bug fixes.
b) Picking a sufficiently old version to reduce the risk of instability.
c) Picking a version that is compatible with the on-disk data I already have on some set of existing production machines.
d) Deciding which point releases contain fixes that are relevant to our deployment.
Respectfully, I don't trust you to come to the correct choice on these issues for me every time, or even once.
I stick by my opinion that anyone who goes with the OS-bundled version of a database server, for any sort of serious production use, is making a mistake.
I can't speak for RHEL (I usually compile from scratch on servers), but here's my take on Fedora:
The positive side of going with the distro packages is that you are less likely to forget a minor upgrade, and the compile options are usually more expansive in their support than what you might do on your own.
On the negative, I have seen a yum-based upgrade between versions happily upgrade the binaries from 8.4.x to 9.0.x....
So there is a tradeoff.
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
