On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Magnus Hagander <mag...@hagander.net> writes: > > On Oct 16, 2014 12:58 AM, "Tom Lane" <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > >> That is in fact exactly what people pay Red Hat to do, and it was my job > >> to do it for Postgres when I worked there. I don't work there any more, > >> but I'm sure my replacement is entirely capable of back-patching fixes > as > >> needed. > > > Do they backpatch everything, or just things like security issues? (in > sure > > they can do either, but do you know what the policy says?) > > Security issues are high priority to fix, otherwise it takes (usually) > complaints from paying customers and/or effective lobbying from the > package's maintainer. They have finite bandwidth for package updates, > and they also take seriously the idea that a RHEL release series is > supposed to be a stable platform. When I was there I was usually able > to get them to update to new PG minor releases only when said releases > involved security fixes, otherwise the can got kicked down the road... > > > Either way it does also mean that the support requests for such versions > > would need to go to redhat rather than the community lists at some point > - > > right now their 8.4 would be almost the same as ours, but down the road > > they'll start separating more and more of course. > > If you want a fix in Red Hat's version of 8.4, you need to be talking to > them *now*, not "at some point". The community lost any input into that > when we stopped updating 8.4. > > > For the op - of you haven't already, is suggest you take a look at > > yum.postgresql.org which will get you a modern, supported, postgresql > > version for rhel 6. Regardless of the support, you get all the other > > improvements in postgresql. > > Yeah. Also, Red Hat is shipping a newer version (I think 9.2.something) > as part of their "software collections" packaging initiative. I do not > know whether that's included in a standard RHEL subscription or costs > extra. > We've looked into both the repos at yum.postgresql.org and Red Hat's SCL, but as most people are already aware, the problem is just that it takes a LONG time to move a production system to a new version of a major component, if it ever happens at all. On a side note, the SCL stuff does require the right type of subsciption ( https://access.redhat.com/solutions/472793 ) and has a MUCH shorter life cycle than the rest of RHEL ( https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/rhscl ) so it's honestly kind of hard to use in most production environments.
