Amazon Linux RPM Changes

We install PGDG as part of a CloudFormation template we offer to construct and configure a cluster on EC2. The template included installation of the pgdg-ami201503-95-9.5-2.noarch.rpm package directly from a PGDG URL.

Unfortunately, this package was removed, causing deployment issues for users of our template. While I understand replacing it with the -3 variant (which uses HTTPS URLs), I don’t understand why older versions were removed. In every other Red Hat OS, they remain; seemingly only the Amazon Linux variants were removed.

Why were the older Amazon repo RPMs removed, and what is the policy going forward on their removal?

Solution?

I noticed one of the OSes has a -latest.rpm variant. If this could be provided for all OSes, it makes installation much simpler (it could be implemented by a symlink). We’ve had to write our own scripts (here <https://github.com/citusdata/packaging/blob/b5c005ad507d30ff419908f66a47b466623df48d/update_dockerfiles#L20-L35> and here <https://github.com/citusdata/packaging/blob/0c70a0b65122b2afae9dc30cc6b13ad9ce9490cd/community/rpm.sh#L107-L146>) to ensure we have the “right” version for a given Red Hat OS. Being able to append -latest.rpm to all URLs would be a fantastic improvement and let us remove this knowledge from our codebase.

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Jason Petersen
Software Engineer | Citus Data
303.736.9255
jason(at)citusdata(dot)com