I've got a question which I hope you'll forgive if I'm missing something obvious...
We (you, me, everyone) are currently presented with a problem when upgrading our installed version of PostgreSQL when upgrading to a major release version (i.e. 8.2 to 8.3, or 8.3 to 8.4) Is it not possible to have PostgreSQL "upgrade" the actual database cluster upon installing a new major version? I don't mean as a step during the actual upgrade. I'm suggesting that, if the database cluster has some sort of attribute which Postgres could read which would identify the latest version it was running against, then a tool (let's call it pg_upgrade) runs against that cluster to make it work against the newly installed version. I'm not sure if it would perform a dump then a restore, or whether it would actually change the data in the cluster (sounds dangerous).
I only ask this as it seems weird to have up dump everything, then restore it all again manually. I'm not sure other RBDMS require the user to perform these manual steps Postgres requires. Actually, it might go down as a pet peeve.
Is such a thing feasible? Or is there a better solution?
Maybe this is probably because I am not familiar enough with dumping and restoring clusters.