Re: The case for the One-Click Installer

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Greg Smith<gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> 1) Getting the installer working on any platform
> 2) Building and testing on Windows platforms
> 3) Building and testing on UNIX platforms
>
> Dave suggested there was 3 man-months worth of work just to get 8.4 out the
> door here.  If you cut the work down to "one-click installers only for
> Windows", basically eliminating just (3) out of the above, I doubt you'll
> discover that reduces the amount of time required to support things in a
> linear way--where the job scales based on the total number of platforms
> supported.  There's both the overhead of packaging anything and the heavy
> Windows overhead relative to other platforms to consider.

From a QA perspective, probably 10% of the effort is OS X, 40% for
Linux (mainly due to the sheer number of Linux distros), and 50% for
the various versions of Windows and different configurations.

From a development and support perspective, Linux & Mac probably
equate to 10% of the effort each. The rest is Windows. The reason it
tends to be so high, is the sheer number of different (and
unpredictable) possible configurations of things like local and domain
security policies, filesystem ACLs, effects of folder redirection,
UAC, changes to utilities between different releases (eg. cacls vs.
icacls), encoding and locale issues and oddities seen when running
over terminal services sessions.

> As someone who has a good feel for how much work is involved, I really
> appreciate the work Dave and the rest of the EDB team involved does to make
> a good PostgreSQL product for Windows.

Thanks Greg.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com