On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 01:33:44PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> 
> Particularly with databases, I'd expect people to be cautious in
> upgrading, and think it's good for pkgsrc to continue support the
> latest stable version in a series until doing so causes some pain.

The latest stable version in the series is 7.4. I don't mean that we
want to run with the newest version, but each version adds some overhead
in form of additional maintainance.

I've discussed the issue with Johnny before and the consensus we reached
was to keep at least the last stable version and the newest version of
the last branch in the tree. Effectively I believe that keeping three
versions ought to be enough (the current release and the other older
branches). This means you have at least 3 month to test an update to the
newest version on the current branch and schedule the update.

> I'm not enough of a pg weenie to know the answers, and it wasn't clear
> from your note.  So unless migration from 7.3 to 7.4 is as simple as
> 
> /etc/rc.d/pgsql stop
> pkg_delete postgresql\*
> cd /usr/pkgsrc/databases/postgresql-74 && make package clean
> /etc/rc.d/pgsql start
> 
> (more or less, depending packages like guile-pg etc.)
> 
> then I think 7.3 should stay.  If it is that easy, then sure it can
> go.

Updating between major branches of PostgreSQL pretty much always
requires a dump/restore cycle. We don't automate this.

Joerg