Re: minimizing downtime when upgrading

On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 08:10:20AM -0400, Kenneth Downs wrote:
> Regardless of whether a package is commercial or free, it strikes me as
> counter to the very soul of programming to build in a burden that
> increases with the user's use of the program, threatening even to tip
> the balance altogether away from its use.  This seems to be the very
> kind of feature that you want to programmatically control precisely
> because it is non-trivial.

That doesn't change the fact that it's a really hard problem. In-place
upgrades would require lots of safety checks because otherwise you
might end up with a cluster that's not readable by any version.

OTOH, you have something like slony which you can use to upgrade to
newer versions without any downtime at all. With a solution like that
working right now, why would people spend effort on making in-place
upgrades work?

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.