Re: Postgresql 8.0 or 8.1 vs. latest Red Hat RPM

Hi,

On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 18:09 -0500, Colin Freas wrote:

> My argument is we should use the latest stable version of Postgres.
> His take is we ought to use the latest version provided by Red Hat.
> (This is for a set of Red Hat Enterprise boxes.)

AFAIK, if you want support from Red Hat, you have to use the packages
provided by Red Hat. If you use any 3rd party or unsupported packages,
they won't support your system. So it depends on you.

We provide RPMs for RHEL boxes:

http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/

Also Command Prompt announced a PostgreSQL distribution that has RPMs
for RHEL 3 and 4:

http://www.mammothpostgresql.org/

> One point of contention in this argument seems to be the notion that
> Red Hat ports security fixes to older versions, even if it has to do
> this itself. I don't necessarily believe that this happens. That is,
> imagine that there's some fix that makes it into the 8.x branch. For
> whatever reason, this doesn't go into 7.x. Red Hat is still using the
> 7.x branch, so it undertakes to do this work itself. Does that sort
> of thing really happen?

Red Hat is still using 7.X in RHEL because 8.0 was very fresh when RHEL
4 was released and I think they thought that it is not tested enough for
Enterprise Linux.

Also, Red Hat does not update to new major version via up2date. This is
their policy that I strongly support.

> Is there a general performance improvement from 7 to 8? What about
> reliability improvements?

Sure. 8.0 was a revolutinary step.

> For how long is the 7.x branch going to be under maintenance and
> development (by the community, not be Red Hat)? Is there even a time
> frame?

7.2 is now unsupported. Since Red Hat uses 7.3 in RHEL3, they (and so
Tom Lane, core developer of PostgreSQL) will continue supporting it.
That means 7.3 will be supported at least 2-3 years more. I'm not sure
about the exact EOL of 7.4.

Regards,
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