Re: Is using cross-version pg_autovacuum possible/safe?

After a long battle with technology, matthew(at)zeut(dot)net ("Matthew T. O'Connor"), an earthling, wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-05-19 at 06:02, Peter Haworth wrote:
>> Is it possible/safe to compile the latest version of pg_autovacuum, and use
>> it with a 7.2.4 postmaster?
>>
>> I know the better solution would be to upgrade everything, but that involves
>> a lot of work which we've managed to put off for a long time already, and
>> autovacuum is pretty much the only feature we really need immediately.
>
> As far as I know, yes. I have tested pg_autovacuum against 7.3.x and
> that work fine.
>
> Since pg_autovacuum is just a standard client app that looks at stats
> collector info to make decisions about when to vacuum, it should work.
> I think there may be been some stats collector bugs that have been fixed
> since 7.2.x, but for the most part it should work just fine.
>
> Please post your results as it might be useful to know if it works.

Actually, no, it doesn't.

pg_autovacuum will "crap out" if pointed at a 7.2.x instance. It
seems most likely that the cause is some changes to the pg_ tables
between the versions; I haven't found the Round Tuits to dig deeply
into it. I no longer have any 7.2 instances I am concerned about for
autovacuum, so I in a sense "don't care" anymore...

If I had the "round tuits," what I'd rather do is to create a daemon,
probably in Perl/Python, that is up to the task of managing a whole
cluster of backends... That is VERY different from the common desire
for something integrated tightly into the back end; I can foresee
value to both approaches...
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