Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004, Jan Wieck wrote:

> As said before, if the sourcecode organization (splitting off interfaces
> and other non-server-side tools) has such impact, then it is a bad idea.
> Most users will not download the source tarball. Most users will install
> some sort of package collection provided by their system distribution.
> That was one of the fundamental arguments that people used when we where
> discussing skimming of the PostgreSQL tarball. Following your logic
> would mean we better state in the 8.0 announcement the *removal of all
> language interface other than C*. Because that is what happened. If you
> download the tarball, there is no Perl, Java, C++ or Tcl library. They
> don't come with the PostgreSQL tarball, therefore from your perspective
> "we" do not have "any language support other than C".

I like that thought, of pointing out that, with this release, the
interfaces continue to be moved to gborg/pgfoundry in order to facilitate
development (and releases) of such seperately from the core server, in
order to ensure that bug fixes and features can get to market faster ...

> Now fortunately, this spartanic tarball isn't what most users will get if
> they select PostgreSQL in their OS distribution installer.

Actually, in FreeBSD ports, this is exactly what happens ... there are
seperate ports for the various interfaces:

> ls -d postgresql*
postgresql-contrib postgresql-libpqxx postgresql-tcltk
postgresql-devel postgresql-odbc postgresql7
postgresql-docs postgresql-plruby postgresql72
postgresql-jdbc postgresql-pltcl postgresql73
postgresql-libpq++ postgresql-relay postgresql_autodoc

Now, if someone could come up with a libpq only distribution, along side
pgxs, a large portion of gborg/pgfoundry could easily find its way into
individual packages without having to download the whole source code ...
again, that's for those building from source ... but even for packagers,
it would be nice to have a "build/libpq" RPM that only included the client
libraries, header files and pgxs, and not all the exra binaries ...

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