[Pkg-postgresql-public] Postgres major version support policy on Debian

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Markus,

Markus Wanner [2008-10-06 17:34 +0200]:
> Note that these are bugfixes only and backporting those is certainly as
> much work as supporting a new major version. Often enough, this should
> just mean upgrading the sources, without having to adjust anything
> debian specific.

Right. The Debian packages are done in a way that almost all the
packaging/integration/upgrade/configuration logic is in
postgresql-common, and the postgresql-X.Y packages just ship the "bare
bits".

When there is a new upstream release, I upgrade the source package to
the new tarball, adapt the patches (which is most of the time a
no-op), build it (which will run the upstream test suite), install
them, run the postgresql-common integration test suite (which
exercises pretty much everything you can do with the package), and
upload if all goes well. That process takes roughly 15 minutes of work
time if you are experienced with the package (plus half an hour to
wait for p-common's test suite).

So it's not a lot of work, but it must be done regularly and in time.

Thanks,

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)