Re: ALTER EXTENSION UPGRADE, v3

On Feb 10, 2011, at 12:02 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Oh, I see, you're just saying that it's not unlikely somebody could find
> himself with dozens of minor releases all being supported. Yeah, he'd
> then really need to provide shortcut upgrade scripts, and
> building/maintaining those would be a pain.

Yes, exactly.

> The design as I sketched it didn't need to make any assumptions at all
> about the meaning of the version identifiers. But if you were willing
> to assume that the identifiers are comparable/sortable by some rule,
> then it wouldn't be that hard for ALTER EXTENSION UPGRADE to figure out
> how to chain a series of upgrade scripts together to get from A to B,
> and then there would be no need for manual maintenance of shortcut
> scripts. IIRC the main objection to doing it that way was that the
> underlying .so has to be compatible (at least to the extent of allowing
> CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION) with all the intermediate versions --- but
> if you believe the use-case I'm arguing for, that would be wanted
> anyway, because all the intermediate versions would be considered
> potentially useful stopping points.

And that was essentially my original proposal.

> I'm not philosophically opposed to requiring the version numbers to be
> sortable, I just didn't want to introduce the concept if we didn't have
> to. But maybe automatic application of a series of upgrade scripts is
> enough reason.

I always thought it was.

Best,

David