Bug 233564

Summary:	Upgrade PostgreSQL to 8.2.x branch
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5	Reporter:	Robert Scheck <redhat-bugzilla>
Component:	postgresql	Assignee:	Tom Lane <tgl>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	5.0	CC:	hhorak
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Reopened
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2007-03-26 20:05:02 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Robert Scheck 2007-03-23 09:06:04 UTC

Description of problem:
Please upgrade PostgreSQL in Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the 8.2.x branch, 
because it contains further improvements and performance speedups. AFAIK the 
upcoming 8.2.4 release will fix the annoying bug with the stats collector,
too. Oh and finally this *could* make switch some of our customers from SuSE
Linux Enterprise Server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 ;-)

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
postgresql-8.1.8-1

Actual results:
PostgreSQL 8.1.x branch

Expected results:
PostgreSQL 8.2.x branch ;-)

Comment 1 Tom Lane 2007-03-23 15:24:34 UTC

Sorry, this is not going to happen because it goes directly against the entire
concept of RHEL, namely to be a stable platform for the lifetime of a given RHEL
release branch.  You'll note that RHEL4 still ships with Postgres 7.4.x...

At some point there will be an Application Stack offering for RHEL5, and I'd
expect that it will include Postgres 8.2 (or maybe 8.3 depending on timing),
but it's much too late to change what the base OS ships.

Comment 2 Robert Scheck 2007-03-26 18:49:13 UTC

Uhm...some time ago, some of the marketing or sales people put some information 
at redhat.com, that new features, development etc. will get backported (e.g. 
driver and kernel backports) into the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 
until the first 3-4 years (?) after publishing. Unfortunately, I can't find 
these nice sentences right now...

Comment 3 Tom Lane 2007-03-26 20:05:02 UTC

The upstream project's policy on this is "only bug fixes in stable branches",
and I fully agree with that.  Red Hat has not got the manpower or interest to
maintain a version of Postgres that diverges substantially from any of those
maintained by upstream.  Even if we did, the need for compatibility of on-disk
files would tremendously limit what we could do.

The kernel situation is quite a bit different, both in terms of available
manpower and in terms of how much can be done without breaking userland ABI.