Re: Duration of beta period

On Sunday 24 February 2002 07:09 pm, Andrew McMillan wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-02-25 at 05:29, Karl DeBisschop wrote:
> > As for Linux, however, the RPMs are typically not available before late
> > beta. I respectfully suggest that closer intergration of the packaging
> > would allow more testing. If I can grab the snapshot, and run 'rpm -ta'

> Ditto, but for me it is Debian.

> I would _really_ like to see basic packaging for RPM and Debian systems
> incorporated into CVS / archives so that people like Karl and myself
> could more easily build packages to install and test.

As one of the said packagers, I'm going to drop in my two cents.

First, the PostgreSQL build isn't terribly RPM/Debian friendly at the moment.
Now, before Peter E chimes in, let me qualify that comment by saying that 7.2
is far better than previous releases.

But there are still too many patches, too many releases that won't compile on
the RPM target systems (beta 4, for instance), and too many idiosyncracies in
the PostgreSQL RPM build to make it an automatic build at this time.

Now, if I toss the regression tests, maybe that could be done -- or if I, as
SuSE did for 7.3, integrate the regression testing as part of the build
instead of an installed package. But a snapshot RPM definitely would need
regression test capability -- and the lion's share of the RPM patch is for
the regression test package.

PostgreSQL has typically been difficult to put in RPM form -- as this
improves I can see tighter integration possible.

BTW, Karl -- thanks for the initscript patch.

It will be at least two weeks before I can put out another release due to my
current workload. If people will feed patches to me, I'll catch up to them
mid to late March and put out an improved RPM set. Maybe by then my Red Hat
6.2-based SPARCclassic will be able to build the RedHat 6.2 compatible source
RPM's -- and sparc32 binaries, of course.

But, in the meantime, these good suggestions are not falling on deaf ears,
even if I don't immediately answer this week and next's e-mail.
--
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11