[postgis-devel] loader incompatibility

[Chris Hodgson]

Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:

>Hi strk,
>  
>
>>My current concern is: is people have both 0.x and 1.x 
>>postgis installed they need both 0.x and 1.x loader too,
>>while current installation rule would make one override
>>the other.
>>    
>>
>
>I must say I don't see this as much of as issue. Since the major number has
>been bumped, people expect 1.0 to be different to 0.9.x, so my personal
>expectation would be to have to re-generate new SQL from my original
>shapefiles and reload them into the database, which is not particularly
>difficult. For people who want to upgrade from 0.9.x to 1.0 then they can
>just dump and then reload if they've already loaded their shapefiles without
>touching shp2pgsql/pgsql2shp....
>  
>

The problem, as I see it, is that people who are migrating from say 0.9 
to 1.0 may need to have fully functional versions of both - ie. they may 
have production applications working with both versions, and want to be 
able to load data into either... but because, as strk points out, we 
completely overwrite any existing shp2pgsql, this won't be possible 
without prior knowledge of the problem. If the 'make install' process 
could just copy the old shp2pgsql to shp2pgsql.9 or something like that, 
it would make me feel better... but that is a bit tricky, because 
upgrading from 1.0 to 1.0.0 shouldn't overwrite the 0.9 version with the 
1.0 version ... hmm... the only alternative would be to maintain a 
separate shp2pgsql.9 in the distribution.

Maybe just something regarding this issue in the release notes and/or 
README or a README.upgrading would be enough to let people know they 
should rename their 0.9 shp2pgsql if they need to keep it.

Just my 2 cents,
Chris