On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Jon Hancock wrote:
I am a fairly new user of postgres and am starting with the very latest 8.3rc1. I need to figure out the pros/cons of compiling from the source of postgres.org or the install package from enterprisedb.
If you like their packaging, by all means use it to make your life easier, but recognize that particularly with the mix of platforms you're using at some point you'll have to come to grips with installing from source. 8.3 is just too new to escape from that. At some point, I predict you'll run into a problem where you're told "oh, we fixed that in CVS HEAD, use that version", and it may be longer than you want to wait before that gets packaged. I would suggest you should even bite doing the OS X install from source because what you learn will be valuable to you for planning the development->production task you have coming.
Installing a private PostgreSQL for a single user (rather than in the system areas like /usr/bin) may even be a useful practice for you to consider, for development in particular where you may even want to have more than one version going at once. There is an example of that at http://developer.postgresql.org/index.php/Working_with_CVS in the first two sections of "Full repository via rsync, local changes in checkout area".
Also, as someone already mentioned, you will be forced at some point to trash whatever database install you do with 8.3rc1. It is a beta and there's already a known issue that will cause later 8.3 releases to use a different internal database format, so you'll have to dump/reload your data and rebuild the whole install at some point.
I have not found a reputable ubuntu package for the latest 8.3 so I suppose I'm left to compile from source if I don't go with enterprisedb.
They may be out before you need to go into production, I'm not aware of any Debian/Ubuntu packagers that are real concerned with supporting PostgreSQL betas. I note with some amusement that a Google search on "postgresql 8.3 ubuntu package" returns an archive of your question as the first hit right now. They may not ever be packaged by some "reputable" for 7.04 though.
I was able to make my own packages for 8.2 once upon a time following the outline at http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/373 but this requires a level of familiarity with their packaging system you may not want to acquire, and I borrowed the shell of another 8.2 packaging some Debian expert had already done; not sure if there's such a model for 8.3 available yet. The same amount of time put into building from source would be more productive for you to get started. The packaging requirements for your production system may require you to build your own packages eventually, all the more reason to get familiar with doing your own builds.
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