Re: Multiple versions of PostGreSQL

[Tobias Nygren <tnn%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Tue, 9 Aug 2016 08:17:51 -0400
"D'Arcy J.M. Cain" <darcy%NetBSD.org@localhost> wrote:

> How hard would it be to allow multiple versions of PostGreSQL to be
> installed?  It would mean renaming include and lib directories as well
> as a few include and bin files with symlinks to the the primary
> versioned files as per mk.conf.  At least some of the Linux
> distributions do this so it is not impossible.
> 
> If we do it it would be nice to do it before PG10 is released.

I'm not a huge fan of the idea, but I do believe it would be possible
and it is also in fact a requirement if we want to properly support
upstream's recommended major upgrade mechanism, pg_upgrade(1):

pg_upgrade(1) needs to be pointed to the old and new bindir+datadir.
Currently to use it one has to either bootstrap an entire alternate
pkgsrc installation to host the previous major version, or manually
unpack a pkgsrc binary package of the previous pg version outside
of /usr/pkg and binpatch the RPATHs. Neither is a pretty solution.

Kind regards,
-Tobias