On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, sathiya psql wrote:
In the home page itself they were saying .... testing ... unstable....
you are talking about the debian home page right?
then we should not use that for live..... so i prefer 8.1 .........
Debian selected the version of Postgres for Etch about a year and a half ago. At that point selecting 8.1 was a resonable choice.
Debian has a policy that they will never change the version number of a package in a stable release (they will backport many bugfixes, but not upgrade the version)
As a result 2 years from now when Postgres is on 8.5 stable (and looking at 8.6), Debian Etch will still be on 8.1
it is of course your option to stick with 8.1, but before very long the answer to most of your questions about postgres is going to be 'upgrade to a resonably current version' (people running 7.4 and 8.0 are starting to get that answer now. 8.1 and 8.2 are recent enough that it's rare to get that now, but in a year or two that will change)
for most utility software you just want it to work and don't really care about new features over a couple of years (or the project has reached the stage where it just doesn't change much over a couple of years). In these situations the Debian policy is great, you don't have to worry about new stuff messing you up.
however some software has much faster development cycles. The kernel has a new release about every two months, Postgres is aiming at a one year cycle, Apache has it's own release schedule. These packages are usually pretty core to your operation and the improvments (and security fixes that are not possible to backport sanely) mean that you need to think very hard about what version of them you are going to run. On my systems I bypass Debian directly for such packages and compile them myself, the backports.org option allows you to avoid that hassle, and get versions that are fairly well tested (like any new version, you need to do some testing yourself), just wait a month or two after a new release hits backports.org and you will be pretty safe.
David Lang
You can get 8.3 from backports: http://www.backports.org/ - it's a debian project to get more up to date versions for existing stable releases (they package everything exactly the same way). -- Postgresql & php tutorials http://www.designmagick.com/
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