On Mon, Nov 17, 2014 at 8:13 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Magnus Hagander <magnus@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On Oct 16, 2014 12:58 AM, "Tom Lane" <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> That is in fact exactly what people pay Red Hat to do, and it was my job
>> to do it for Postgres when I worked there. I don't work there any more,
>> but I'm sure my replacement is entirely capable of back-patching fixes as
>> needed.
> Do they backpatch everything, or just things like security issues? (in sure
> they can do either, but do you know what the policy says?)
Security issues are high priority to fix, otherwise it takes (usually)
complaints from paying customers and/or effective lobbying from the
package's maintainer. They have finite bandwidth for package updates,
and they also take seriously the idea that a RHEL release series is
supposed to be a stable platform. When I was there I was usually able
to get them to update to new PG minor releases only when said releases
involved security fixes, otherwise the can got kicked down the road...
> Either way it does also mean that the support requests for such versions
> would need to go to redhat rather than the community lists at some point -
> right now their 8.4 would be almost the same as ours, but down the road
> they'll start separating more and more of course.
If you want a fix in Red Hat's version of 8.4, you need to be talking to
them *now*, not "at some point". The community lost any input into that
when we stopped updating 8.4.
> For the op - of you haven't already, is suggest you take a look at
> yum.postgresql.org which will get you a modern, supported, postgresql
> version for rhel 6. Regardless of the support, you get all the other
> improvements in postgresql.
Yeah. Also, Red Hat is shipping a newer version (I think 9.2.something)
as part of their "software collections" packaging initiative. I do not
know whether that's included in a standard RHEL subscription or costs
extra.
We've looked into both the repos at yum.postgresql.org and Red Hat's SCL, but as most people are already aware, the problem is just that it takes a LONG time to move a production system to a new version of a major component, if it ever happens at all.
On a side note, the SCL stuff does require the right type of subsciption ( https://access.redhat.com/solutions/472793 ) and has a MUCH shorter life cycle than the rest of RHEL ( https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/rhscl ) so it's honestly kind of hard to use in most production environments.
