Re: add-ons and kernelization was Time to work on

chris(at)metatrontech(dot)com (Chris Travers) writes:
> From this angle, it is less important how many people *use* Blue
> Elephant. It is more important how many people are brought into the
> PostgreSQL community because we can make a more creditable case that
> our project meets their needs. Blue Elephant then acts as a
> showcase for what PostgreSQL can be, rather than what the toolkit
> that it is.

The only "Blue Elephant" approach I can think of as practical is to
build something akin to a Knoppix-based distribution that includes the
lot of PostgreSQL "stuff," and that has the unfortunate effect of
restricting this 'official' release of a PostgreSQL 'distribution' to
that.

What strikes me as more interesting is to see what the packagers for
some reasonably small subset of package-oriented systems wind up
doing. Let's consider the set of PostgreSQL "add-ons" that are known
to be well-packaged for all of:

a) FreeBSD Ports
b) Debian testing
c) Fedora
d) RHAS/RHES
e) SuSE Linux
f) MandrakeSoft Linux

That certainly isn't a comprehensive list of all platforms on which
PostgreSQL runs, but it's a big enough list to cover a LOT of likely
users. The "common add-on list" won't get vastly more credible if I
add Gentoo and Slackware to the list.

They're certainly all packaging DBI and Pg; many of them already have
some packaging of even such "esoterica" as pg_autovacuum. I believe
there's a BSD Port for Slony-I, and no doubt people are already
starting to think about RPM/dpkg packaging for it.

There is Debian packaging for many of the additional server-side
languages, going as far as including R. Java is conspicuously absent;
the ambiguity about "freeness" makes it a bit tough to make too
terribly much stuff depend on it.
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