* Joshua D. Drake (jd@commandprompt.com) wrote:
>
> >[OT]
> >So Debian has a patch that is not in 8.1.2? I can't believe that they
> >are doing that -- personally I'm against to add any patch into binaries
> >that is not in the core.
> >[/OT]
> >
> This is not a Debian thing. Lots of distributions do it. I wouldn't be
> surprised
> if RedHat did it as well.
I'm not sure they do but they're not really a fair comparison as they
have a somewhat privileged position due to Tom (not that I'm
complaining, honestly I think it's wonderful that RH has an apparently
dedicated person for Postgres and it's outstanding that it's someone as
intelligent and knowledgable as Tom). It's certainly not uncommon for
distributions in general to patch programs which make them not-quite
pure upstream. Then again, just a recompile can break things too so
it's not like pristine source is always an option. It's also true, as
has been pointed out before, that Debian uses --enable-integer-datetimes
(or whatever the flag is) which isn't enabled by default. For the vast
majority of Debian users this is correct and better than the default but
it does mean that a PostgreSQL default-options compile will generate a
postmaster that can't work with Debian data files. Then again, if you
omit --enable-krb5 and the Debian package doesn't then if you move to a
default-compiled version you might not be able to authenticate to your
database anymore either.
Thanks,
Stephen