Re: Volunteer to build a configuration tool

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007, Campbell, Lance wrote:

> The postgresql.conf settings would be tailored more to the individuals
> needs than the standard default file. The second Iframe would contain
> the default settings one should consider using with their operating
> system.

I'd toyed with making a Javascript based tool for this but concluded it
wasn't ever going to be robust enough for my purposes. It wouldn't hurt
to have it around through, as almost anything is an improvement over the
current state of affairs for new users.

As far as prior art goes here, there was an ambitious tool driven by Josh
Berkus called Configurator that tried to address this need but never got
off the ground, you might want to swipe ideas from it. See
http://cvs.pgfoundry.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/configurator/configurator/ for
some documents/code and
http://pgfoundry.org/docman/index.php?group_id=1000106 for a handy
Open-Office spreadsheet.

If you want this to take off as a project, make sure you can release the
code under a free software license compatible with the PostgreSQL project,
so others can contribute to it and it can be assimilated by the core
project if it proves helpful. I know I wouldn't spend a minute working on
this if that's not the case.

I'd suggest you try and get the basic look fleshed out with some
reasonable values for the parameters, then release the source and let
other people nail down the parts you're missing. Don't get stressed about
making sure you have a good value to set for everything before releasing a
beta, it's a lot easier for others to come in and help fix a couple of
parameters once the basic framework is in place.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD