On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 6:23 PM, David Boreham <david_l...@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. >> >> >> > > No dissing intended. I didn't say or mean that OS-delivered PG builds were > generally broken (although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see that > happen in some distributions, present company excluded). > > 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
