Puppet users - Jan 2013 - Deprecating PostgreSQL versions < 8.4 for use with PuppetDB

Hello! We''d like to deprecate some fairly old and crusty PostgreSQL
versions (anything older than 8.4) for use with PuppetDB. There are a few
reasons we want to do this:

* 8.0, 8.1, and 8.2 have been EOL by upstream for quite some time now, and
8.3 goes EOL in a couple of weeks:
http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/

* Those earlier versions don''t support certain features that are
critical
to making certain operations usable (most notably, we need GIN indexes to
make searches based on tags fast enough to be practical).

* The only distro Puppet Labs supports that still ships with one of these
older versions is RHEL5. The "postgresql" package will give you
version
8.1. There are vendor-supported packages for 8.4 available, though they
aren''t the default: https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2010-0276.html

* This isn''t about forcing people to use the latest-and-greatest.
PostgreSQL 8.4, which we''ll continue to support, was released in July
of
2009. :)

* By all current indicators, extremely few users will be impacted by this.
Nearly all users are already on a suitably recent db version, or are on a
platform where the available default packages are recent enough. I''m
only
aware of a handful of PuppetDB users on 8.1, and I''ve not heard of a
single
person using 8.2 or 8.3.


So what we''d like to do:

* Add a deprecation warning into the next 1.x release of PuppetDB

* Fix up our puppet module to install a suitable version of postgresql,
even on rhel5

* provide some basic instructions on migrating data from one database
version to the next

* drop support in PuppetDB 2.0 _at the earliest_, and even then not before
the above migration instructions and module fixes are released


Let us know if this will ruin your plans for World Puppet Domination,
either here on on IRC (talk to grim_radical, nlew, or cprice)!

deepak

--
Deepak Giridharagopal / Puppet Labs

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Hi deepak!

Coming from the ruby/rails community this is an super friendly
ahead-of-time deprecation idea notice..

On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 02:21:21PM -0800, Deepak Giridharagopal
wrote:
> Hello! We''d like to deprecate some fairly old and crusty
PostgreSQL
> versions (anything older than 8.4) for use with PuppetDB. There are a few
> reasons we want to do this:
On one hand, this is probably how it should be with infrastructure
projects like this. On the other hand, I just like both the reasoning
and the tone.

Thanks!
Matthias Viehweger
-- 
Serververwaltung und Softwareentwicklung
 
https://www.heute-kaufen.de
Prinzessinnenstraße 20 - 10969 Berlin