Welcome!

Hi,

After having been talking about it for so long, a debian maintainer
*team* around PostgreSQL related efforts is forming. <applause> :)

So, this list is about organizing our work together, and I think we
should begin with listing what we want to do. Oh and maybe saying hello
so that the others get to discover who's on board ! :)

Here's what I have in mind, and have been talking to some of you
individually:

- PostgreSQL packaging for debian

My understanding is that Martin would appreciate some help there,
mainly in order for the team to still be responsive to releases when
that conflicts with his own personal schedule. Which is hard to
achieve with a team of one.

- same, for all supported major versions

It would also be good to maintain packaging for all supported major
versions of PostgreSQL. The technical details are already there, of
course, so it's about servicing our users in a way that debian is
unable to (because of stable policies about reaching EOL).

It means some effort to test/validate that the current common
packages continue supporting all supported major versions, which is
not the current intention, even if apparently it works well enough
for 8.3 onward. Some specifics for supporting older releases have
been cleaned out of the common code, IIUC.

- extension packaging for same set of versions

Most extensions are source-compatible with several major versions, if
not all of them, but currently debian only offers packaging for one
target version at a time. There's now postgresql-server-dev-all with
the pg_buildext script to help solve that (thanks to VPATH build).

The goal here would be to get all compatible extensions to use this
mechanism and easily build postgresql-X.Y-ext packages with X.Y in
the list 8.3, 8.4, 9.0 and 9.1, currently.

Christoph is also playing with the idea of implementing a tool based
on the PGXN client, dh-make-pgsql-extension or something, that would
offer the same service as dh-make-perl for CPAN.

- http://apt.postgresql.org/

As debian policy is not compatible with distributing all those things
from the two previous points, another goal is to host binary packages
for debian GNU/Linux for i386 and amd64 on the PostgreSQL
infrastructure. Maybe we could add some more archs here, or support
for debian/kFreeBSD, but that is not the immediate goal.

Let's rock debian and PostgreSQL worlds together even more :)

Regards,
--
Dimitri Fontaine
http://2ndQuadrant.fr PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support