During one of the updates of Fedora, Postgres was upgraded. After not having used my Postgres datbases for some time I recently found that the data had at some stage become incompatible with one of the versions of Postgres.

The not so helpful advice is; to re-install an old version of Postgres do a database backup, upgrade Postgres and then reinstall the data. Even if this were not problematical it is time consuming.

Have these people ever experienced rpm hell? If you try to return to an old rpm, a long list of applications dependent on the newer rpm also have to be removed. Applications that I would rather remain on the computer. This is really annoying.

Does anyone know a way to convert the old Postgres database to the new format without ripping my poor computer's software to pieces.


This would be most helpful to many people I am sure.

Sorry, there's no other way. Well, you can avoid RPM hell by
NOT trying to install the old version from the RPM but rather
using the source tar-ball. If the version discrepancy isn't all
too dramatic it should compile fine within the more recent environment.

And don't complain about "these people" (I assume you're talking
about the good folk from postgreSQL?). Their upgrade guides are
quite clear - if the package maintainers for fedora choose to ignore
their pretty clear warnings and do a drop-in replacement of the
binary they should be tarred and feathered ...



Cheers,
Tink