Thanks for the detailed response. We'll look at upgrading to 8.3.9 from an RPM.
On Mar 15, 2010, at 6:01 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> David Jantzen <djantzen@ql2.com> writes:
>> Due to some historical idiosyncracies in our environment, we have a custom 8.3.7 database installation built from
source. We'd like to install dblink into this, however there are some problems with doing so:
>
>> 1) the 8.3.7 database was built on a CentOS 4 build box that has since gone away
>> 2) currently we have only 8.3.9 code built against CentOS 5
>> 3) the GCC compiler on CentOS 4 was quite old
>> 4) possible API changes in dblink between those versions
>
>> My question, how risky would it be to copy the dblink.so and .sql files from the CentOS 5 compilation of Postgres
8.3.9over to the CentOS 4 compilation of Postgres 8.3.7? If runtime errors result, how severe would they be? I.e.,
wouldthey take down a postgres backend or possibly the postmaster daemon?
>
> I think you've got a fundamental problem that you'd better fix. If you
> are unable to rebuild the database from source then you are unable to
> update --- and you are already three minor versions behind and missing
> multiple security and crash-risk bug fixes. You're living on borrowed
> time, and NEED to reinstantiate your ability to build for that platform.
> Or move to a newer one.
>
> FWIW, you could probably get back a RHEL4 build environment pretty
> cheaply by setting up a suitable "mock" chroot on a recent Fedora
> version (installed on the same type of hardware).
>
> As for your direct question: no, I wouldn't count on that to work.
> RHEL4 and RHEL5 had different glibc versions didn't they?
>
> regards, tom lane