Postgres 8.4 in karmic does not upgrade 8.3 cluster or include instructions on how to do so

Bug #463355 reported by Dave Rolsky
74
This bug affects 14 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
postgresql-8.4 (Ubuntu)
New
Undecided
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Bug Description

Binary package hint: postgresql-8.4

I upgraded to Karmic, which removed the postgresql-8.3 packages and upgraded to 8.4.

That's all fine, but along the way it simply initialized a new database, without upgrading my existing data, and I can't even find any docs explaining how to do this.

I tried this:

 autarch@houseabsolute:~$ sudo pg_upgradecluster -v 8.4 8.3 main
 Error: target cluster 8.4/main already exists

First, that required I re-install postgresql-8.3, then I got the error you see above.

Then, I tried moving /var/lib/postgresql/8.4/main out of the way and got:

 autarch@houseabsolute:~$ sudo pg_upgradecluster -v 8.4 8.3 main
 Error: specified cluster is not running

Hmm, should I start pg 8.3? I did that, then got the first error that the target cluster exists.

Finally, I figured out that I needed to have 8.3 running, then move both /etc/postgresql/8.4 and /var/lib/postgresql/8.4 out of the way entirely.

At the very least, new packages need clear instructions on how to migrate, although ideally this would be done automatically as part of the upgrade.

Revision history for this message
John Edwards (john-cornerstonelinux) wrote :

Upgrade instructions are in /usr/share/doc/postgresql-common/README.Debian.gz.

In version 8.4.2-2 of this package both this file and a (poor) summary of the upgrade is displayed during the package upgrade. These instructions could be made clearer.

For your particular problem you needed to stop and drop the 8.4 cluster before the upgrade.

Revision history for this message
Ludwig Seitz (ludwig-axiomatics) wrote :

This is real nuissance in Lucid, since you need 8.3 installed to do pg_upgradecluster and 8.3 gets uninstalled and unsupported when upgrading to Lucid. Do I really need to install 8.3 from the sources to be able to do this, or is there a better way?

Revision history for this message
Tim Keitt (tkeitt) wrote :

Agreed. This is a real pain. Did you end up installing from source?

Revision history for this message
Ludwig Seitz (ludwig-axiomatics) wrote :

No I just hoped for the best and installed the Karmic .deb packages. That worked ... thanks for asking.

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