Re: Upgrading rant.

In article <200301032331(dot)h03NVfc22523(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us>,
pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us (Bruce Momjian) wrote:

> Is pg_upgrade too hard to run? Is no one really interested in it?

As an end-user, I'm very interested in pg_upgrade, but I think it's kind
of a chicken and egg problem.

Without much of a guarantee that it's fail-safe, I'm not inclined to
test it. As kind of a hamstrung DBA, I don't have a lot of time to do
mock-upgrading of my postgres installations. I would imagine there are
plenty of DBAs in the user community in this position: wanting a good
upgrade utility but not having the time/inclination to do testing on
what is available.

For commercial products, QA is usually internal. One of the slight
drawbacks to the free software community is that more of the burden of
QA is placed on the at-large community of users.

All this being said, if an outline were posted of what steps to take to
test pg_upgrade and ensure that everything were working properly, I'd be
more inclined to take the plunge. As it is, I'd have to do a fair amount
of research on my own to make sure nothing broke. And that is the step I
don't have time for.

-tfo