We still have this problem to solve with extensions and their packaging. How to best organize things so that your extension is compatible with before 9.1 and 9.1 and following releases of PostgreSQL?

Well, I had to do it for the ip4r contribution, and I wanted the following to happen:

dpkg-deb: building package `postgresql-8.3-ip4r' ...
dpkg-deb: building package `postgresql-8.4-ip4r' ...
dpkg-deb: building package `postgresql-9.0-ip4r' ...
dpkg-deb: building package `postgresql-9.1-ip4r' ...

And here's a simple enough way to achieve that. First, you have to get your packaging ready the usual way, and to install the build dependencies. Then realizing that /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions from the latest postgresql-common package will only return 8.3 in lenny (yes, I'm doing some backporting here), we have to tweak it.

postgresql-server-dev-8.4
postgresql-server-dev-9.0
postgresql-server-dev-9.1
postgresql-server-dev-all

$ sudo dpkg-divert \
--divert /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions.distrib \
--rename /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions

$ cat /usr/share/postgresql-common/supported-versions
#! /bin/bash

dpkg -l postgresql-server-dev-* \
| awk -F '[ -]' '/^ii/ && ! /server-dev-all/ {print $6}'

Now we are allowed to build our extension for all those versions, so we add 9.1 to the debian/pgversions file. And debuild will do the right thing now, thanks to pg_buildext from postgresql-server-dev-all.

The problem we face is that the built is not an extension as in 9.1, so things like \dx in psql and CREATE EXTENSION will not work out of the box. First, we need a control file. Then we need to remove the transaction control from the install script (here, ip4r.sql), and finally, this script needs to be called ip4r--1.05.sql. Here's how I did it:

$ cat ip4r.control
comment = 'IPv4 and IPv4 range index types'
default_version = '1.05'
relocatable = yes

$ cat debian/postgresql-9.1-ip4r.install
debian/ip4r-9.1/ip4r.so usr/lib/postgresql/9.1/lib
ip4r.control usr/share/postgresql/9.1/extension
debian/ip4r-9.1/ip4r.sql usr/share/postgresql/9.1/extension

$ cat debian/postgresql-9.1-ip4r.links
usr/share/postgresql/9.1/extension/ip4r.sql usr/share/postgresql/9.1/extension/ip4r--1.05.sql

Be careful not to forget to remove any and all BEGIN; and COMMIT; lines from the ip4r.sql file, which meant that I also removed support for Rtree, which is not relevant for modern versions of PostgreSQL saith the script (post 8.2). That means I'm not publishing this very work yet, but I wanted to share the debian/postgresql-9.1-extension.links idea.

Notice that I didn't change anything about the .sql.in make rule, so I didn't have to use the support for module_pathname in the control file.

Now, after the usual debuild step, I can just sudo debi to install all the just build packages and CREATE EXTENSION will run fine. And in 9.0 you get the old way to install it, but it still works:

$ psql -U postgres --cluster 9.0/main -1 \
-f /usr/share/postgresql/9.0/contrib/ip4r.sql
<lots of chatter>

$ psql -U postgres --cluster 9.1/main -c 'create extension ip4r;'
CREATE EXTENSION

That's it :)

Tags

PostgreSQL debian Extensions release ip4r 9.1