On Tuesday, January 23 2024, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote: > On Thu, Jan 18 2024 at 11:21:18 -0500, Sergio Durigan Junior > <sergi...@ubuntu.com> wrote: >> On Thursday, January 18 2024, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote: >> >>> On Wed, Jan 17 2024 at 21:09:58 -0500, Sergio Durigan Junior >>> <sergi...@ubuntu.com> wrote: >>>> On Wednesday, January 17 2024, Christopher James Halse Rogers >>>> wrote: >>>> >>>>> Hi there! >>>> Hey, Chris, >>>> Thanks for the review. >>>> >>>>> On Sat, Jan 13 2024 at 00:08:35 -0500, Sergio Durigan Junior >>>>> <sergio.duri...@canonical.com> wrote: >>>>>> Hello, >>>>>> In the same spirit as Christian's formal request for an SRU >>>>>> exception >>>>>> for open-vm-tools, Athos and I would like to formally request >>>>>> the >>>>>> approval of the PostgreSQL MRE wiki page. >>>>>> We (the Server team) have been doing such MREs for a number of >>>>>> years >>>>>> now, but it came to our attention recently that we don't >>>>>> actually >>>>>> have >>>>>> the MRE policy for PostgreSQL formally defined in a wiki page, >>>>>> as >>>>>> is >>>>>> usual for more recent packages. >>>>>> I don't know much about the history behind why such page doesn't >>>>>> exist, >>>>>> but we would like to fix it by proposing the following document: >>>>>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PostgreSQLUpdates >>>>> It looks like a good documentation of current practice, and >>>>> current >>>>> practice looks (mostly) good. >>>>> A couple of questions: >>>>> * Checking the PostgreSQL policy, they say that a pg_dump/restore >>>>> cycle between minor updates is *normally* not needed. Has it >>>>> *ever* >>>>> been needed in the past? Presumably we would not take such an >>>>> update >>>>> (at least, not under this MRE)? >>>> Athos and I have been doing this MRE for a bit more than a year >>>> now, >>>> and >>>> so far we have never seen a situation where a pg_dump/restore cycle >>>> was >>>> needed. I'm Cc'ing Christian, who used to handle the MREs before >>>> us, in >>>> case he knows something more. >>>> >>>>> * I notice a number of the updates are of the form “Fix FROB >>>>> index. If >>>>> you have any FROB indexes, you must run FROBINATE REINDEX to >>>>> get >>>>> the >>>>> fixes”. How do we notify users of this? It's in the >>>>> changelog, >>>>> which >>>>> is not nothing, and a debconf notice would be *way* too >>>>> disruptive. Is there anywhere else we should be pushing such >>>>> “you >>>>> really should check this” notifications? >>>> That's a good question. My default answer for such scenarios tends >>>> to >>>> be "let's put it in a d/NEWS file", but I appreciate the fact >>>> that not >>>> everybody will have apt-listchanges installed. Nonetheless, maybe >>>> that's a good compromise between having the entries buried in the >>>> changelog vs. having a debconf notice. WDYT? >>> Ooooh, yes. d/NEWS would definitely be an improvement! >> Cool. >> Just to clarify: does this mean that this request is approved >> pending >> the d/NEWS addition to the wiki page? > > I'd like an answer to the other question before approving - what > happens if a pg_dump/pg_restore cycle *is* required across a minor > update. Presumably the answer is “that update will not fall under this > MRE”, but we should document both that decision and how we expect to > pick up when this would apply.
OK, that is a good question. I thought about it yesterday, and my answer here pretty much aligns with what you expected. But let me give a little bit of context first. It's important to say that, to the best of my knowledge, there has *not* been any PostgreSQL minor release that required a pg_dump/pg_restore cycle ever since we started doing these MREs. And that, I believe, is for a good reason: upstream must know that they would be shooting themselves in the foot in case they required such drastic measure from their users. And I must say that upstream seems pretty reasonable to me, given my interactions with them for the past 3 years (give or take). So, IMHO, the chances of us seeing such a requirement in a minor release are very, very low. On top of that, let me assure you that Athos and I (and the whole Server team, if I'm being honest) would straight out refuse to proceed with the MRE if we saw a breaking change/operation like this being required. There is just no way to guarantee the data integrity of our users' databases in such case, so having this being part of a LTS release is a no-no from our standpoint. Therefore, in a nutshell: if PostgreSQL upstream ever requires a pg_dump/pg_restore cycle to be performed as part of a minor release update, then that update will not fall under this MRE. > Once that has a satisfactory answer, yes, it looks good to approve to > me. Hopefully my answer is enough, but please let me know if you'd like more details. BTW, I will take the liberty of updating the wiki page to reflect the answer above, and also to include the d/NEWS requirement as previously discussed. Cheers, -- Sergio GPG key ID: E92F D0B3 6B14 F1F4 D8E0 EB2F 106D A1C8 C3CB BF14 -- Ubuntu-release mailing list Ubuntu-release@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-release
