Re: A note on pg_upgrade and missing "pg_upgrade_support.so"

2010/9/21 Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>:
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> Ian Barwick wrote:
>> > Hi
>> >
>> > Just a quick note for anyone else building 9.0 from source and experimenting
>> > with pg_upgrade - if you get a message like the following when running the
>> > pg_upgrade binary:
>> >
>> > pg_upgrade_support.so must be created and installed in
>> > /path/to/pg90/lib/postgresql/pg_upgrade_support.so
>> >
>> > you need to build the the separate "pg_upgrade_support" as well.
>>
>> Well, that is step #4:
>>
>>       http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/pgupgrade.html
>>       4.
>>
>>       Install pg_upgrade
>>
>>       Install pg_upgrade and pg_upgrade_support in the new PostgreSQL cluster
>>
>> Was that not clear enough?
>
> I hope my comment didn't sound insulting.  I really want to know how
> that doc item can be made clearer.

No insult taken :) .With the benefit of hindsight it's plenty clear;
the problem was:

a) I was doing this in a hurry (had a small amount of time to kill and
a dev machine with an older beta on it)
b) got sidetracked by this thread which appears to describe the same
problem: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-testers/2010-06/msg00000.php
and which was popping up pretty high in Google.

Looking over the doc page again, if scanning over it, it's a bit easy
to misread it as something like "Install pg_upgrade for pg_upgrade
support in the new PostgreSQL cluster".

To my shame I hadn't even looked at pg_upgrade before, so was coming
to it from a point of zero knowledge. How about a slightly more
pedantic phrasing such as:

------
4. Install pg_upgrade

pg_upgrade requires the installation of the contrib modules
"pg_upgrade" and "pg_upgrade_support" in the new PostgreSQL cluster
------

(maybe "pg_upgrade" and "pg_upgrade_support" could be highlighted in
some way, e.g. with the courier-style font if that fits in with the
doc functions).

Anyway, it worked fine and I have since used it to upgrade to 9.0 on
my personal "production" server with minimal downtime.

Thanks for yet another great release

Ian Barwick