Re: Three weeks left until feature freeze

On Thu, 13 Jul 2006, Jonah H. Harris wrote:

> On 7/13/06, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> This is really the whole issue right here: you want a monolithic "core"
>> distribution. I cannot begin to list the number of things wrong with
>> that approach, but suffice it to say that that's not the way PostgreSQL
>> is moving.
>
> I'm not going to argue at all and will gladly second Josh's statement.
> If the core doesn't want to include it, commercial companies
> (EnterpriseDB, Command Prompt, ...) and consultants will continue to
> do it for us.

Isn't that what is called creating a 'Value Added Product'? Our *product*
is PostgreSQL RDBMS ... not "PostgreSQL RDBMS and everything that you can
use to interface with it" ...

> I don't think we should include everything, and I belive that "collapse"
> is debatable. The important part is how the distro itself is managed.
> One can easily create a "core" distribution which includes PL/Java,
> ODBC, JDBC, etc. All of them don't have to reside in the same CVS tree,
> but they can be built and released together. I know because I've done
> it... and it's not that difficult. The hard part is actually deciding
> what to include and what not to.

'k, now, why don't you take that script you would have developed to pull
all those parts together and create a pgFoundry project for it, so that
the work you did doesn't get lost, and/or others can build on it?

> Like I said, this discussion always seems to come up and we always go
> back to saying "leave it to pgfoundry", "we'll promote pgfoundry",
> "pgfoundry is the best place for it". Yet, I haven't really seen any
> action to make pgfoundry any better or more well-known.

Do you have any suggestions to this end? Considering that my first search
on pl java produced both gborg and pgfoundry before the actual development
site/wiki for pl/java, from a search engine, they are both well known ...

> OK, but who is going to do this? It certainly doesn't sound like any of
> us want to spend the time educating packagers as we're either working on
> our own things or for companies that already do package PostgreSQL.

The maintainers of the non-core projects should be doing this ... it
should be our job to promote either pl/Java *or* pl/J as being one better
then the other ... I know with the *BSD camps, *anyone* can build a
package ... I'm guessing that it isn't that hard on the Linux side either
... so why is there a set group of "packagers" that even have to be
addressed/educated?

I know within the FreeBSD "porters" community, there are *at least* 6
different ppl that deal with packages that revolve around PostgreSQL ...
does, as an example, pl/Java not have *any* FreeBSD ppl? NetBSD? Someone
that has one of them that can read a set of instructions to create the
package and submit it the respective project for inclusion? In the case
of both FreeBSD and NetBSD, both D'Arcy and I have offered to make sure
that they get in, we're just not in a position to actually build the
port/package itself ...

The thing is, IMHO ... if you have 100 ppl willing to build an RPM
package, but none of them have any interest in java, you aren't going to
convince any of them to build the package ... you need to find someone
*within* the non-core project with a desire to build it, and take
responsibility for it. For *core*, Devrim step'd up long ago for doing
RPMs ... but, and I may be wrong, but I doubt he'd going through extra
effort to build a pljava RPM just because it was part of core, especially
if he a) knows nothing about java and b) doesn't even have java installed
...

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