On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 8:23 PM, David Boreham <david_list@boreham.org> wrote:
> On 3/3/2012 7:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>
>>
>> [ raised eyebrow... ] As the person responsible for the packaging
>> you're dissing, I'd be interested to know exactly why you feel that
>> the Red Hat/CentOS PG packages "can never be trusted". Certainly they
>> tend to be from older release branches as a result of Red Hat's desire
>> to not break applications after a RHEL branch is released, but they're
>> not generally broken AFAIK.
>>
>>
>
>
> No dissing intended. I didn't say or mean that OS-delivered PG builds were
> generally broken (although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see that
> happen in some distributions, present company excluded).
>
> I'm concerned about things like :
>
> a) Picking a sufficiently recent version to get the benefit of performance
> optimizations, new features and bug fixes.
> b) Picking a sufficiently old version to reduce the risk of instability.
> c) Picking a version that is compatible with the on-disk data I already have
> on some set of existing production machines.
> d) Deciding which point releases contain fixes that are relevant to our
> deployment.
>
> Respectfully, I don't trust you to come to the correct choice on these
> issues for me every time, or even once.
>
> I stick by my opinion that anyone who goes with the OS-bundled version of a
> database server, for any sort of serious production use, is making a
> mistake.
I have been generally happy with the RedHat/CentOS/ScientificLinux
offerings (with respect to PostgreSQL, specifically).
Furthermore, I also make extensive use of openSUSE offerings and
generally prefer them.
openSUSE has an 8 month release cycle and as a consequence I'm rarely
too far behind the latest _stable_ release, while still being able to
run the last-most-recent stable release for, I think, 3 years. If I
want more, that's what the commercial offerings are for.
--
Jon