[DebianGIS-dev] Upgrading from Postgis 1.1 to 1.3 on Etch

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:12:56PM +0200, Arto Jantunen wrote:
> 
> I tried doing this simply by backporting the Lenny packages to Etch
> (with the needed modifications to build postgresql 8.1 compatible
> binaries and such). This fails because the new package removes
> /usr/lib/postgresql/8.1/lib/liblwgeom.so.1.1, which makes the existing
> database fail entirely.
> 
> Is there a known process which allows this to work?
> 
> If not, I see two options: 
> 
> 1. Create new package that can be installed together with the old
> postgresql-8.1-postgis (say postgresql-8.1-postgis13)
> 
> 2. Create a symlink from liblwgeom.so.1.1 to liblwgeom.so.1.3
> 
> The gotcha for option 1 is the existing symlinks (liblwgeom.so and
> liblwgeom.so.1). If something on the system uses these, there may be
> unexpected trouble.
> 
> With option 2 the problem is simpler. Is it even supposed to work?
> 

No. You should be so lucky to not meet some ABI breakage, 
which is not the case.

> Any help would be appreciated, no need to cc me on replies, I am on
> the list.
> 

This is only managed in a tricky way by recent lenny versions.
Basically you need to keep around the old shared lib because
existent DBs refers to it. Unfortunately, this was not managed
in etch release. My suggestion is extracting the shlib in the old
package and move it in the right place, with no symlinks, which
is roughly what the new package does.

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine