Re: pg_upgrade project status

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Zdenek Kotala <Zdenek.Kotala@sun.com> wrote:
> The current project is not in good shape. Feature freeze is coming and
> nothing is committed. Currently there are three patches in the game:

Correction: feature freeze is long past.

> 1) Space reservation
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-12/msg00886.php
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-01/msg02031.php
>
> This patch is mandatory for page online conversion and MUST TO be part
> of postgreSQL 8.4. if not ... then we will be at the beginning next
> year.
>
> I sent updated version today.

I thought we pretty much had agreement that space reservation was not
a good solution to anything, although I admit I'm not quite clear on
what alternative was being proposed.

> 2) pg_upgrade.sh
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-12/msg00248.php
>
> Pg_upgrade.sh is shell script for catalog conversion. It works for
> 8.3->8.4 upgrade. It will be useful while we will not have better
> solution. Disadvantage is that it is korn shell script. The idea is to
> rewrite it in PERL which is more portable, but I'm not PERL expert and
> currently there is no workable solution.
>
> And what is deadline for it? We can delivery it later with 8.4.1, but
> best time for testing is during betas and RC period.

Why is the deadline different than anything else?  Surely the deadline
is 11/1/2008, and you missed it.

Admittedly, there is some window for reworking existing patches after
the start of the commitfest, but this patch wasn't even added to the
CommitFest wiki until December 5th, after being sent to the list the
previous day.  That's not close, and there's been little discussion of
it on the mailing list since then, and given that it's written in ksh,
it's clearly going to require a complete rewrite to be committable.

Three months after the CommitFest started is not the right time to
start a complete rewrite of a feature that wasn't even on time in the
first place.  There is nothing whatever to prevent you from releasing
this on pgfoundry, but the idea that we should spend time on this
rather than the half a dozen (or more) patches that have had far more
work and are probably far closer to being committable strikes me as
100% wrong.

> 3) preupgrade script
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2008-12/msg01273.php
>
> I sent WIP version of this script, which shows how reservation space
> feature will be used. This part is not important now. It will be
> important for 8.4->8.5 upgrade and cannot be finished until 8.5beta.

...Robert