Request MRE approval for PostgreSQL

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Wed, Jan 17 2024 at 21:09:58 -0500, Sergio Durigan Junior 
<sergiodj at 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.durigan at 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!