[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#857770: src:postgresql-debversion: please provide a unversioned binary package

[Christoph Berg]

Re: Antonio Terceiro 2017-03-27 <20170326234116.xkcx7wjcyrqsxnmb at debian.org>
> As you said, it has the issue of not helping with upgrades.

True...

> What if, instead of the versioned packages, you provided unversioned
> package names, and each package contained one .so for each supported
> PostgreSQL version? It seems that postgresql-server-dev-all exists for
> exactly this purpose ...

This has the problem that the set of supported versions varies over
time, and that it's different in Debian, and elsewhere. We would be
shipping a 9.6-only package in Debian, and a package containing
everything from 9.2 to 9.6 on apt.postgresql.org. The necessary
dependencies would be non-trivial I'd think. Also this would make it
impossible to provide modules packages for the upcoming PostgreSQL 10
version, because "postgresql-debversion.deb" is already in use there.

I agree that the situation is not optimal, but I think what we have
now is the best we could get to over the past years. Unfortunately
this means you'll need to encode some knowledge about the current
PostgreSQL server version in your deployment recipes.

Christoph