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West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
> At this point, you are no longer in repo land,
> you are now in developer land.
Dru, you were in "developer land" the second you hopped into #postgresql for support rather than #ubuntu (or #fedora, or #debian, or whatever) for support. And *of course* they're going to tell you to get to their version of "current", because it's what *they're* supporting.
This is not to say that you could not have gotten support within your distribution's own channels for the PostgreSQL package. You can.
Also: you do NOT have to compile from source to get on PostgreSQL 9.x - you just add the backports repository for your distribution, and *poof*, you're on a version close enough to PostgreSQL's bleeding edge that few of the people in #postgresql will bitch - or if they do, they'll do so basically because "upgrade to current!" is the first easiest no-effort shot at getting you to just go away without having to do any individualized work.
Which isn't intended as a stab at the guys in #postgresql or any other developer-related channel - that's how support *works*; you first try the easy angles before you dig down and provide heavy support. The problem is, when you ask the developers themselves for support rather than working through the distribution, yes, you ARE putting yourself right into "developer-land"... so you have to act like a developer, and do all the high-maintenance crap that developers do.
Again - and, please, keep in mind that I know this because *I have developers using this package, on production servers, right now* - current PostgreSQL is 9.1.2, and current PostgreSQL in Debian Squeeze backports is 9.1.2.4... implying that SINCE the release of 9.1.2, the repository package maintainer has upgraded the package *four times* to apply bugfixes, integration fixes, or other improvements over the initial case scenario of the release itself.
For Ubuntu, lucid-backports doesn't have PostgreSQL 9.1 - but there *is* a PPA which carries newer versions, current there being 9.1.2.1 - again, implying at least one fix SINCE the drop of 9.1.2 itself, which is current on the vendor site.
Anthony, you keep making accusations that nobody's backing their statements up with hard data - but neither are you.
We're all just exchanging opinions here.