Introducing the future Debian multiversion/multicluster architecture

Hi!

As an ultra-short introduction, I am the primary Debian developer for
PostgreSQL packages.

Our current packages became pretty hard to maintain; in particular
automatic upgrades to new major versions have always been a pain and
fail very often. There are also many requests for supporting more than
one cluster.

Thus we are currently developing a completely new packaging system and
architecture for future PostgreSQL packages which allow to manage
arbitrarily many clusters (also of different versions) in parallel.
This allows to do cluster updates in a running system, independently
of package upgrades, and will generally be much more robust and useful
also for web hosters.

I have heard that some guys of other distributions want to do
something similar in the future, so I was asked to publish the general
ideas for public review and discussion:

http://people.debian.org/~mpitt/postgresql-ng.html

Thanks in advance for any thoughts,

Martin

(Please respect Mail-Followup-To or keep me CC'ed, I'm not
subscribed).

--
Martin Pitt http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntulinux.org
Debian GNU/Linux Developer http://www.debian.org