Re: what Linux to run

On 3/3/2012 7:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> [ raised eyebrow... ] As the person responsible for the packaging
> you're dissing, I'd be interested to know exactly why you feel that
> the Red Hat/CentOS PG packages "can never be trusted". Certainly they
> tend to be from older release branches as a result of Red Hat's desire
> to not break applications after a RHEL branch is released, but they're
> not generally broken AFAIK.
>
>

No dissing intended. I didn't say or mean that OS-delivered PG builds
were generally broken (although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see
that happen in some distributions, present company excluded).

I'm concerned about things like :

a) Picking a sufficiently recent version to get the benefit of
performance optimizations, new features and bug fixes.
b) Picking a sufficiently old version to reduce the risk of instability.
c) Picking a version that is compatible with the on-disk data I already
have on some set of existing production machines.
d) Deciding which point releases contain fixes that are relevant to our
deployment.

Respectfully, I don't trust you to come to the correct choice on these
issues for me every time, or even once.

I stick by my opinion that anyone who goes with the OS-bundled version
of a database server, for any sort of serious production use, is making
a mistake.