You wrote "Unfortunately Red Hat's backwards-compatibility policy forbids dropping new major PG releases into old RHEL branches". So that means I cannot upgrade to Postgresql 8.x on a RedHat9 server? Currently I am using Postgresql 7.3 but was planning on upgrading before I put the database into production.
Thanks, Margaret Gillon, IS Dept., Chromalloy Los Angeles, ext. 297
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:33:53 -0500 From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> To: Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com> Cc: "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com>, Leon Pu <leon_xf_pu@yahoo.com.cn>, Devrim GUNDUZ <devrim@commandprompt.com>, "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>, pgsql general <pgsql-general@postgresql.org> Subject: Re: PostgreSQL support on Redhat Advance Server 2.1 Message-ID: <5629.1143581633@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Scott Marlowe <smarlowe@g2switchworks.com> writes: > On Tue, 2006-03-28 at 13:14, Jim C. Nasby wrote: >> Tom has mentioned in the past that he's been backpatching stuff to 7.3 >> as part of his job, so I would assume that RH will support any 7.3 >> version.
> But only for supported OSes. I'm pretty sure 2.1 is past due on that > count.
The real problem is that PG 7.1 is effectively unsupportable: there are too many fundamentally unfixable bugs in it, such as transaction ID wraparound, type-unsafeness in I/O routines, yadda yadda. These things can't be dealt with without introducing significant incompatibilities, which means you may as well just update to some newer version instead.
Unfortunately Red Hat's backwards-compatibility policy forbids dropping new major PG releases into old RHEL branches, so AS2.1 is stuck with 7.1. The best I can do in the way of support is to wave a big cluestick at anyone foolish enough to try to use Postgres on that platform: get a newer version, or expect to regret it. I'm not bothering to back-patch bug fixes, in view of the huge unfixable bugs.
RHEL3 (with PG 7.3) is at least something you could plausibly use Postgres on without expecting to lose data, so 7.3 is still getting fixes for major bugs.