On January 12, 2004 07:09 am, Michal Pasternak wrote:
> Gavan Fantom [Mon, Jan 12, 2004 at 12:57:22PM +0000]:
> > Could the deinstall script not dump the data into some "standard"
> > location, to be used by a subsequent install script if necessary?
>
> I think someone could have a look how Debian does it. Debian can
> automatically upgrade existing PgSQL databases (via dump/restore procedure,
> nothing magic there) -- but it had such functionality from some time, so I
> guess that Debian PostgreSQL upgrading scripts can be quite mature now.

That solution has a few problems.

1.  I may not be ready for that upgrade.  I may just want the bug fixes I can 
get by going from 7.3.3 to 7.3.4 and not want the functional differences 
between 7.3.x and 7.4.x

2. I may have more than one database and I need to upgrade them one at a time 
because they are in production and I can't afford a flag day.

3. How does it know where all my databases are?  On my production system I run 
5 databases and none of them are running on the standard port.

4. What if my databases run on different machines than the one I build the 
software on?  This can happen if you stage your production software for 
testing purposes and rsync later or you could NFS mount the binaries from any 
number of machines.

The point is that 7.4.x is different software than 7.3.x in that it runs 
different databases.  There is a migration path but it is not straight 
forward.  It sounds to me like the Debian scheme is designed for toy systems 
but robust production systems need to give a lot more control to the 
administrator.

If I think that I need a system that knows better than me how to run things, I 
know where to find NT.  :-)

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@netbsd.org>
http://www.NetBSD.org/