Bug 460074

Summary:	unacceptable data loss (unconvertability) on upgrading
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Frank Ch. Eigler <fche>
Component:	postgresql	Assignee:	Tom Lane <tgl>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	9	CC:	hhorak
Target Milestone:	---
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Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2008-08-26 02:51:48 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
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Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Frank Ch. Eigler 2008-08-26 01:54:58 UTC

Upon a recent update to fedora 9 that included a bump to postgresql 
(8.3.3-2.fc9), I was shocked to find that the data migration widgets
formerly in the rpm spec file have been disabled.  Now my data is dead
and inaccessible unless I somehow reinstall the previous version of
postgresql by hand, dump the data, update postgresql again, and then
restore.

This is unacceptable.

Some possible fixes:
- the automagic rpm data migration script should be brought back
- postgresql should be fixed to migrate its own old data files
- postgresql rpm should forbid updating itself -- probably
  also possible with a simple rpm spec hack %pre_inst

Comment 1 Tom Lane 2008-08-26 02:51:48 UTC

AFAIK there have never been any "data migration widgets" in any postgres RPM shipped by Red Hat.  I know some other distros have tried to handle that automagically, but it generally doesn't work very well --- running arbitrary code in a scriptlet is a bad idea.

Upstream is aware that upgrade-in-place would be a nice thing to have, but it's a hard problem...

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 398221 ***