Debian: upgrading from was: What Linux edition we should chose?

On Mon, 31 May 2010 17:23:51 +0200
Szymon Guz <mabewlun(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> > Yeah it is. But what is it going to be an upgrade process? On a
> > production box?
> > Any experience to share on upgrading from source on Debian?

> Usually that's pretty easy: for upgrading the minor version (e.g.
> from 8.3.1 to 8.3.3) it should be enough to compile the new
> sources, stop server, run `make install` and run the server with
> new binaries. Upgrading from 8.3 to 8.4 can be easily done using
> dump from current version. There is nothing wrong to run the new
> and old postgres versions parallel so you can copy data from one
> database to another. There is also pgmigrator, but I haven't
> checked that yet.

That's clear but there are a bunch of small and possibly very
annoying details that make deploying in production a bit more
challenging than ./configure, make, make install.

I admit I only compiled postgres in my /home when I was developing
an extension. It is something I do rarely and never on production.

If I was thinking to upgrade on a debian box that is already running
a packaged version I'd have to understand how deal with debian
patches (I think most were related to paths where postgres expect to
find it's stuff).

Once I understand what all debian patches do I'll try to see if I
can avoid them all so that upgrading will be easier the next time.

I'll have to see how debian ./configure the package, I'll have to
replicate the init.d script for the newer version, take care of
making the 2 servers run temporarily on different ports... etc...

I could even think of making a .deb

I think about it I could even come up with a longer list of things I
should do.

I bet I'm not the first one that's going to upgrade Debian from
source. So someone may share his recipe and caveats.

I was actually thinking to test 9.0 in my /home on some real world
DB. That could be a chance to learn how to upgrade from source.

--
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it