Re: (A) native Windows port

On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 16:41, Hannu Krosing wrote:
> On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 13:48, Oliver Elphick wrote:
> > On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 01:30, Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> > > Example: When PG 7.3 is released, the RPM / deb / setup.exe include the
> > > postmaster binary for v 7.2 (perhaps two or three older versions...).
> >
> > That isn't usable for Debian. A package must be buildable from source;
> > so I would have to include separate (though possibly cut-down) source
> > for n previous packages. It's a horrid prospect and a dreadful kludge
> > of a solution - a maintainer's nightmare.
>
> The old postmaster should not be built/distributed. As it is for
> _upgrading_ only, you just have to _keep_ it when doing an upgrade, not
> build a new "old" one ;)

No, it doesn't work like that. You cannot rely on anything's being left
from an old distribution; apt is quite likely to delete it altogether
before installing the new version (to enable dependencies to be
satisfied). At present I have the preremoval script copy the old
binaries to a special location in case they will be needed, but that
fails if the version is very old (and doesn't contain that code), and
it's a very fragile mechanism.

I never have understood why the basic table structure changes so much
that it can't be read; just what is involved in getting the ability to
read old versions?