Request MRE approval for PostgreSQL

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Thu, Jan 18 2024 at 11:21:18 -0500, Sergio Durigan Junior 
<sergiodj at 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
>>  <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!
> 
> 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.

Once that has a satisfactory answer, yes, it looks good to approve to 
me.

Cheers,
Chris