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

[Josh Berkus]

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

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

[Lukas Smith]

Joshua D. Drake wrote:



Aside from obviously the big issue of who maintains all the pgfoundry
stuff, I also think that the PostgreSQL family would benefit from a
distribution that is more and the kitchen sink style. I do not know
exactly if Bizgres could be considered just that? Or maybe it could get
promoted to be that?


Lukas, that is what www.mammothpostgresql.org is :)


Doh, yes .. totaly forgot about that one.

Again I think it makes absolute sense to have a nicely sized core for 
all the friendly forks to base their work on. However I think all newbie 
PR should be directed at the monolithic distro and not to that nicely 
sized core.


Cluefull people that want to create their own PostgreSQL distro will 
naturally gravitate to PostgreSQL, while newbies come to PostgreSQL 
right now. They dont find the feature they are looking for, and we miss 
out on getting them into PostgreSQL.


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.


Again, the truely cluefull people will naturally gravitate to the 
PostgreSQL core project while the monolithic distro sucks in the newbies.


regards,
Lukas

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