[postgis-devel] Packaging 2.1

[Paul Ramsey]

Hi all, 
We've come across an issue that occurs when packaging 2.1. (In this case, in a slackware package, but the issue will probably occur everywhere)
Basically, if you've made a "postgis2" package that says its version is 2.1 and that it supercedes the old 2.0 "postgis2" package what will happen is that postgis-2.1.so will be installed, and postgis-2.0.so will be removed.
Then when you go to ALTER EXTENSION upgrade, the upgrade will fail, because the old library (which functions are still bound to) is missing.
The only way things work is if a "postgis-2.0.so" file is still around. 
This seems like a big packaging problem.

First, on Windows question: does installing a new version of the windows package just write in the new files, and leave the old files untouched? I'm assuming "yes", otherwise you'd have seen the same problem.

Second, on Linux question: what should we do? We almost need to start fully numbering our postgis packages to make it clear you can have multiple minor versions installed simultaneously: postgis2.0, postgis2.1, etc. This will make our package names even more awesomely awful, but I don't see a way around it.

P.




-- 
Paul Ramsey
http://opengeo.org
http://postgis.net