Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0

Jan Wieck wrote:
> Now fortunately, this spartanic tarball isn't what most users will
> get if they select PostgreSQL in their OS distribution installer. So
> the question would rather be *what is our recommendation for package
> maintainers?* That collection is what hopefully most end users will
> experience as the PostgreSQL database product, and that is the
> picture we have to draw in our release announcement.

Take a look at, say, KDE or GNOME. Their software is split up in all
kinds of ways. Each little program has its own maintainer, version
number, etc. Yet, to the general public it surely seems like KDE and
GNOME are pretty integrated. Why is that?

It's because above all these small parts there is an umbrella
organization that provides services to each small part to make them
look integrated, such as:

- release management
- security issue management
- localization support
- documentation support
- bug tracking
- packaging support
- marketing support
... and more.

We don't provide those services. Back in the days when everything was
one tarball, we provided those services in an integrated fashion by
default, but I can understand why that system doesn't work beyond a
certain size. But by gborg or pgfoundry we don't provide these
services either. A developer that makes use of gborg basically just
rents machine space and bandwidth with some preinstalled software that
allows him to set up the above mentioned services for his own project.
But that doesn't make it integrated.

So, for the issue at hand, no matter how much we like replication,
endorse slony, or respect Jan's work, it's not part of PostgreSQL, in
the eyes of the public. And a press release or three isn't going to
fundamentally change that, because the facts don't back it up.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/