Re: 9.5alpha2 published to trusty-pgdg?

On 1 November 2015 at 05:16, Christoph Berg <myon(at)debian(dot)org> wrote:
> Re: Craig Ringer 2015-10-30 <CAMsr+YGNDGe2GoKOc1ovg15_XeTb0cAJ+JEnJGOtcJu2fj24cw(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Was 9.5alpha2 published to trusty-pgdg, such that a user could get it
>> with "apt-get install postgresql-9.5" ?
>>
>> I've seen a few people complaining that their PostgreSQL stopped
>> working after "aptitude upgrade" with complaints of incompatible
>> catalog versions, and it turns out they were running 9.5alpha2 and had
>> it broken by updating to 9.5beta1.
>
> [snip]
>
> So everyone who's on 9.5 now had actively modified their sources.list
> to allow that (or applied some --force-whatever hammer to dpkg).

Thanks for the explanation, it's appreciated and useful.

I wouldn't be surprised if the people I've seen on Stack Overflow etc
did just that, e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/q/33433088/398670

> We've had a "this is beta ymmv" warning in some beta package
> descriptions before (iirc in 9.3), but of course we forgot to remove
> them when .0 came out, so we refrained from doing that again.

Also, the people who blindly "apt-get install postgresql-9.5" are not
likely to be reading package descriptions.

About the only thing I can think of that'd help would be a preinst
script or debconf question requiring confirmation that they know their
data might not be readable after an upgrade. That suffers from the
same problems as the package text warning, only more intrusive.

> But I just realized that there's an easy way out of the situation: We
> do already stow the lib packages of 9.5 into the "9.5" component, we
> could as easily move *all* binary packages of the 9.5 source there as
> well. That would make then invisible to non-beta users, and wouldn't
> change anything for the beta users, because they need to update their
> sources.list to include "9.5".
>
> I'll apply that fix to the next 9.5 beta or rc upload.

Sounds sensible.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services