Re: [WIP] In-place upgrade

"Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> That means, in essence, that the earliest possible version that could
> be in-place upgraded would be an 8.4 system - we are giving up
> completely on in-place upgrade to 8.4 from any earlier version (which
> personally I thought was the whole point of this feature in the first
> place).

Quite honestly, given where we are in the schedule and the lack of
consensus about how to do this, I think we would be well advised to
decide right now to forget about supporting in-place upgrade to 8.4,
and instead work on allowing in-place upgrades from 8.4 onwards.
Shooting for a general-purpose does-it-all scheme that can handle
old versions that had no thought of supporting such updates is likely
to ensure that we end up with *NOTHING*.

What Bruce is proposing, I think, is that we intentionally restrict what
we want to accomplish to something that might be within reach now and
also sustainable over the long term. Planning to update any version to
any other version is *not* sustainable --- we haven't got the resources
nor the interest to create large amounts of conversion code.

regards, tom lane