Re: Avoiding upgrade backlash

Leif B. Kristensen wrote:
> On Tuesday 13. November 2007, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> Leif B. Kristensen wrote:
>>> On Monday 12. November 2007, Josh Berkus wrote:
>>>> I'm thinking that we need to warn everyone about:
>>>> 1) They need to use 8.3's pg_dump, not the old version, to upgrade
>>> Isn't there a chicken-and-egg problem here? On my Gentoo system, I
>>> have always been forced to uninstall the old version before
>>> upgrading to a new version.
>> That's a Gentoo shortcoming, nothing more.
>
> I've started a thread about it in the Portage & Programming section of
> forums.gentoo.org:
>
> http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-615494.html
>
> I hope that someone more knowledgeable than me will be able to
> contribute in bringing this issue to the attention of the Gentoo
> developers, and hopefully work out a solution. Sure, there are other
> Gentoo users than me around here?

Aye, there's at least one more (at least on my development machine).

I wanted to point out that Gentoo does already have a solid way of
handling this -- you just have to use an overlay. If you have "layman"
installed, check out the "postgresql-testing" and
"postgresql-experimental" overlays.

I use the latter and have 8.1.10, 8.2.5 and 8.3beta1 all running happily
on the same machine without having had to do anything other than add
that overlay and set each instance to use a different port. Each release
is very nicely slotted and they all get along just peachy.

-Jon

--
Senior Systems Developer
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/