Yeah, a lot of the time I'd agree with you. :)

This container came about for the Redash project (https://github.com/getredash/redash), which had been stuck on PostgreSQL 9.5 (!) for years.

Moving to a newer PostgreSQL version is easy enough for new installations, but deploying that kind of change to an existing userbase isn't so pretty.

For people familiar with the command line, PostgreSQL, and Docker then its no big deal.

But a large number of Redash deployments seem to have been done by people not skilled in those things. "We deployed it from the Digital Ocean droplet / AWS image / (etc)".

For those situations, something that takes care of the database upgrade process automatically is the better approach. :)

I disagree. It is (or was, last time I tried a year or two ago) hard to upgrade postgres because you need both the old and new binary. Package manager tries its best to allow just one copy. You end up copying from one image to another, then run into tiny breaking differences.

I agree it should be explicitly invoked and not automated, for something almost everyone needs to do, it sure is a hard task.

I think the point of this container is to be that explicit admin action.

Changing the docker container version is still explicit? Also, you don't have to worry about having both versions of postgres installed with this

yes. i do have a few developer environments this would be great for though.