Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Mathieu L." <lejatorn AT smgl.homelinux.net>]

If the dump&restore one can be done, then I think it should be the one
that should get the priority.

Although the choice in PREPARE is a fancy solution, you never know what
can go wrong with it; like the sysadmin can be in a bad mood because he
had awfull sex the previous night and he makes the wrong choice because
he's not focusing enough on what he's doing. Or the default choice might
not be what you want and you start an unattended sys update and of
course you forgot to sorcery hold postgres spell.

So 2) is good, but 1) is more crucial imho because one can always
recover the database with it, however bad one screwed up.

Cheers,
Mathieu. 

On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 11:21:56AM +0000, Lalo Martins wrote:
> 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/
> 
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