Re: Allowing multiple versions of PG under NetBSD

On Fri, 29 Jul 2016 15:07:53 -0400
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> > The answer is either chroot or mount and run pg_upgrade on another
> > server. If you can afford the downtime you can also delete PG,
> > install the new version and run pg_upgrade without modifying the
> > existing DB. If it succeeds then replace the directories and
> > restart the new version. If it fails then uninstall PG, reinstall
> > the older version and restart. Lather, rinse, repeat until it
> > upgrades cleanly.
>
> pg_upgrade needs to run the old and new server binaries as part of its
> operation, so that would not work.

My mistake. I must have used the chroot idea last time I did an
upgrade.

I might take a look at the NetBSD package (I'm a developer) to see how
hard it would be to allow multiple versions. We do keep all the lib
stuff in a separate directory so that part would be relatively simple.
We just need to find all the binaries and make the names versioned and
add a symlink to the user selected primary version to the bare version
of the binary name. Example:
- psql.8.3
- psql.9.1
- psql.9.3
- psql ==> psql.9.3

Other than linking to the correct library can you think of any other
issues with this?

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