Re: what Linux to run

On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 6:23 PM, David Boreham <david_list(at)boreham(dot)org>wrote:

> On 3/3/2012 7:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>>
>> [ raised eyebrow... ] As the person responsible for the packaging
>> you're dissing, I'd be interested to know exactly why you feel that
>> the Red Hat/CentOS PG packages "can never be trusted". Certainly they
>> tend to be from older release branches as a result of Red Hat's desire
>> to not break applications after a RHEL branch is released, but they're
>> not generally broken AFAIK.
>>
>>
>>
>
> No dissing intended. I didn't say or mean that OS-delivered PG builds were
> generally broken (although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see that
> happen in some distributions, present company excluded).
>
> I'm concerned about things like :
>
> a) Picking a sufficiently recent version to get the benefit of performance
> optimizations, new features and bug fixes.
> b) Picking a sufficiently old version to reduce the risk of instability.
> c) Picking a version that is compatible with the on-disk data I already
> have on some set of existing production machines.
> d) Deciding which point releases contain fixes that are relevant to our
> deployment.
>
> Respectfully, I don't trust you to come to the correct choice on these
> issues for me every time, or even once.
>
> I stick by my opinion that anyone who goes with the OS-bundled version of
> a database server, for any sort of serious production use, is making a
> mistake.
>
> I can't speak for RHEL (I usually compile from scratch on servers), but
here's my take on Fedora:

The positive side of going with the distro packages is that you are less
likely to forget a minor upgrade, and the compile options are usually more
expansive in their support than what you might do on your own.

On the negative, I have seen a yum-based upgrade between versions happily
upgrade the binaries from 8.4.x to 9.0.x....

So there is a tradeoff.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers