Tom Lane wrote: > These are straw men. No, these are real problems that exist today.
> We know we have a problem with hard-coded paths > in old dumps. This is irrelevant for non-core languages. If I have PL/foo 1.0 installed and upgrade from PostgreSQL 8.0 to 8.1, then I have to manually recompile PL/foo and install the shared library. So manual intervention is required in any case and no template system of any kind will help. Moreover, the hard-coded paths will not be solved by your proposal. I don't suppose that in a release or three will start hard coding postgis parameters to work around hard coded paths in general plug-in modules? > We know we have a problem with missing validators in > old dumps This is irrelevant for non-core languages. If I have PL/foo 1.0 installed and upgrade from PostgreSQL 8.0 to 8.1, the validator in PL/foo 1.0 will not magically appear or disappear. The information in the dump is the only accurate information that exists about the existence of a validator. The information in the template is completely unrelated to reality. You are assuming that during the update from PostgreSQL 8.0 to PostgreSQL 8.1 there will also be an upgrade from PL/foo 1.0 to PL/foo ${latest-at-time-of-8.1-release}, but there is simply no basis for assuming that. > And I think that a template is much more likely to > prevent than introduce the sorts of mis-definition problems you > suggest No, the template system introduces misdefinitions that would otherwise not exist. > --- all of them can easily happen now from simple user > errors, whereas with a template it would be right every time. As you can see above, that is not true. -- Peter Eisentraut http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/ ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings