Re: The case for the One-Click Installer

On Thu, 9 Jul 2009, Joshua Kramer wrote:

> Would having a bare-bones installer, that installed the contrib packages (but
> did not insert them into template1) be a benefit?

Somebody might be able to do something with them. But as Joshua was
pointing out, the root problem here is not a source code one, it's a
manpower one. The MSI installer was itself a viable codebase to work
from if there were people who wanted to do it.

EDB's one-click installer stack is completely open-source and anybody else
could replicate what they do given enough people and resources to work on
it. If that weren't the case, I'd be among those shouting from the
rooftops that there's a serious problem here. The only problem that's
worth solving here is finding those resources.

I don't know exactly how EDB's work has gotten carved up there, but I know
my own multi-platform forays suggest that the Windows builds take a
disproportionate amount of resources to maintain compared to ones based on
RPM and deb formats. On a gross level there's three chunks of work here:

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.

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. I don't think many people
here have a full feel for how hard it is to run a software QA effort
against a complicated product. And while I don't directly use the
one-click installer myself on the Linux platforms I mainly use, having it
as an option does seem to provide some value to new users in particular.

I'm really disappointed at how little respect for that work and its value
to the community is being shown the last few days here. Obviously it
would be better if that were done by volunteers or with a no-strings
attached sponsorship, but just recognizing that fact doesn't make those
resources appear.

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