Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Lalo Martins <lalo.martins AT gmail.com>]

Ok, I finally got annoyed enough about postgres breaking database 
compatibility on every point release.  It was enough of a pain when I 
upgraded to 8.2 (and being new to SMGL, I was taken by surprise, then had 
to downgrade, dump, upgrade again, restore.  And no, I didn't know about 
dispel -d then :-( anyway...), but now I have to go through that again.  
Nay!  Enough, I say thee!

There are three solutions.  Brain surgery on the upstream developers is, 
unfortunately, out of my budget.  So that leaves another two.

We could do what the debian family does: dump the database on every 
dispel, then on FINAL, if we find a dump, restore it (and rename it so 
that you don't lose your data next time).  Unfortunately, it's slightly 
easier for dpkg, because debs "know" when they're being upgraded as 
opposed to removed.  But I think it can be done.

OR, we could just offer a choice of version on PREPARE: right now that 
would be between latest 8.1, latest 8.2, or latest 8.3.  The reason I 
like this solution is that a sysadmin may want to upgrade from, say, 
8.1.8 to 8.1.11 for bugfixes, but not to 8.3.1, which may have a whole 
bunch of other incompatibilities, and may be less stable.  (As in, me.
I don't think I want to touch 8.3 just yet.)

I'll implement whatever we can agree on, but I'd like to pick your minds 
on which one first.  I think ideally we'd want to have both, so consider 
that an option as well.  (Too much work?  Well, option 2 would take me 
all of about 10 minutes to do, so why not.)  Also, since I don't plan to 
*maintain* the spell afterwards, I don't want to make an unilateral 
decision that other people will have to deal with later ;-)

best,
                                               Lalo Martins
-- 
      So many of our dreams at first seem impossible,
       then they seem improbable, and then, when we
       summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
                           -----
                  http://lalomartins.info/
GNU: never give up freedom              http://www.gnu.org/