Re: ALTER EXTENSION UPGRADE, v3

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 7:49 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> If you were expecting this proposal to make things easier as far as
> dealing with multiple major releases, sorry, our ambitions don't extend
> that far yet.

Sorry, I might have been confusing here... I'm not talking about *PG*
major releases.

I'm talking about "major release" of my extensions. So, assoming I
only care about PG 9.1, but I have afoo-1.x and afoo-2.x that I
develop and release (much like PostgreSQL has 8.4.x and 9.0.x it
releases), I want to be able to provide a bug-fix of my afoo-1.x
extension, and not require that for them to get that bug fix, they
also need to get the latest 2.x installed as well (which may or may
not be in use elsewhere in the cluster, or by a 2nd cluster on the
same machine).

Or, similarly, if I have a "master" type branch of an extension in use
in my qa DB, upgrading it requires forcing an upgrade of the old 8.4
branch extension in use in my prod database, simply because the
extension infrastructure has forced extension authors to only be able
to release a single "extension" that alwyas packages the lastest of
all back branches...

Of course, it won't, because just like the RPM/DPKG situation,
packagers are going to put the "major version" number into the
extension name to avoid that.

So, I like that the attempt is to support multiple versions. But
unless you can manage the files (both shared libraries, and any
scripts to create/update SQL objects) for different version
independently, I can't see the "multiple versions at once" capabilites
that are being discussed being actually being used by anything more
than the most basic extensions...

Just like if I need a bugfix of PostgreSQL 8.4, I'm not forced to
*install* 9.0, because PG has decide that the proper way to release
ist o make a single release of all versions.

a.

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