Michael Fuhr wrote:
>
> > The other thing that I'm thinking is that it's quite possible that (as
> > hypothetical examples) PL/Perl, PostGIS and PL/R wouldn't be happy on the
> > same machine, at which point the only way to merge their functionality in
> > complex work would be to use a "farm".
>
> What sort of "unhapiness" are you thinking is "quite possible"?
Well I must confess that I was rather looking at worst cases here- constructive
pessimism :-)
However I think one scenario would be if I were relying on binary packages and
found that while most of the ones I wanted were in (say) Debian/stable but one
was only in Debian/testing. I'd be reluctant in this case to "upgrade" a
development machine from stable to testing, and would either go for a scratch
machine or for an image running under User Mode Linux.
Historically my preference has usually been to build from source, but even then
there are cases where installing some prerequisite implies unwelcome mutilation
of a stable machine- not strictly database-related but having to install gd and
then finding that requires an upgrade of TrueType springs to mind.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]