Re: monolithic distro (was: Re: Fwd: Three weeks left until feature freeze)

Lukas, all:

> So what I am suggesting is that PostgreSQL.org should push people
> towards the monolithic distro. The docs should contain everything that
> is in the monolithic distro. At conference we should say the name of the
> monolithic distro etc.

The issue I think you're ignoring is that maintaining such a distro and its
build system for a reasonable number of platforms would require an enormous
amount of work ... like, 3-4 full-time developers and at least a dozen
part-time developers. Compare the staff requirements for Debian, Red Hat or
SuSE. I can tell you from being the Bizgres admin for a few months that just
trying to maintain/debug a build system that would do PostgreSQL +
JasperReports + KETL + 4 optional modules on four platforms was easily 20-30
hours of work, *per release*. So this isn't something we can just vote into
existance.

Second with "endorsing" or "certifying" projects on pgFoundry and elsewhere,
who has the time? To rate stuff as mature/not mature a committee of
PostgreSQL people would have to be constantly reviewing projects, every
single month, and probably getting into long political debates to boot. If
we do less, a repeat of the libpq++/libpqxx mess is inevitable.

It's very nice to throw these things out there and put them on the TODO
list ... and if I had $100,000 in development money to throw at something, I
might spend it that way ... but to propose them as *immediate* solutions to
problems for 8.2 is fantasy.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco