Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2023 20:48:23 +0200
From: Sandro Santilli <strk@kbt.io>
Sender: strk@kbt.io
To: Regina Obe <lr@pcorp.us>
Cc: 'Yurii Rashkovskii' <yrashk@gmail.com>, 'Tom Lane' <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
	'Regina Obe' <r@pcorp.us>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Support % wildcard in extension upgrade filenames
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On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 11:09:40PM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
> > On Mon, Apr 03, 2023 at 09:26:25AM +0700, Yurii Rashkovskii wrote:
> > > I want to chime in on the issue of lower-number releases that are
> > > released after higher-number releases. The way I see this particular
> > > problem is that we always put upgrade SQL files in release "packages,"
> > > and they obviously become static resources.
> > >
> > > While I [intentionally] overlook some details here, what if (as a
> > > convention, for projects where it matters) we shipped extensions with
> > > non-upgrade SQL files only, and upgrades were available as separate
> > > downloads? This way, we're not tying releases themselves to upgrade paths.
> > > This also requires no changes to Postgres.
> > 
> > This is actually something that's on the plate, and we recently added a --
> > disable-extension-upgrades-install configure switch and a `install-extension-
> > upgrades-from-known-versions` make target in PostGIS to help going in that
> > direction. I guess the ball would now be in the hands of packagers.
> > 
> > > I know this may be a big delivery layout departure for
> > > well-established projects; I also understand that this won't solve the
> > > problem of having to have these files in the first place (though in
> > > many cases, they can be automatically generated once, I suppose, if they are
> > trivial).
> > 
> > We will now also be providing a `postgis` script for administration that among
> > other things will support a `install-extension-upgrades` command to install
> > upgrade paths from specific old versions, but will not hard-code any list of
> > "known" old versions as such a list will easily become outdated.
> > 
> > Note that all upgrade scripts installed by the Makefile target or by the
> > `postgis` scripts will only be empty upgrade paths from the source version to
> > the fake "ANY" version, as the ANY--<current> upgrade path will still be the
> > "catch-all" upgrade script.
> 
> Sounds like a user and packaging nightmare to me.
> How is a packager to know which versions a user might have installed?

Isn't this EXACTLY the same problem WE have ? The problem is we cannot
know in advance how many patch-level releases will come out, and we
don't want to hurry into cutting a new release in branches NOT having
a bug which was fixed in a stable branch...

Packager might actually know better in that they could ONLY consider
the packages ever packaged by them.

Hey, best would be having support for wildcard wouldn't it ? 

> I much preferred the idea of just listing all our upgrade targets in the control file.

Again: how would we know all upgrade targets ?

> We need to come up with a convention of how to describe a micro update,
> as it's really a problem with extensions that follow the pattern

I think it's a problem with extensions maintaining stable branches,
as if the history was linear we would possibly need less files
(although at this stage any number bigger than 1 would be too much for me)

--strk;