Re: [pgsql-advocacy] Increased company involvement

On Tue, 3 May 2005, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>> On Tue, 3 May 2005, Dave Cramer wrote:
>>
>>> How come we have never seen anyone complain on the lists that the tarball
>>> is too big ( or have we )
>>
>>
>> Because ppl are downloading the "split distributions" instead of the whole
>> tarball ... *every* PostgreSQL related port in FreeBSD uses the split-dists
>> (only downloads the base and opt packages) ...
>
> FreeBSD is a very small part of the OS planet compared to Linux and Win32.
>
> Look at how big the Win32 installer is ;)

Agreed, but that is a binary distribution ... also, and this is based only
one the impression I've gotten from the list(s), and not on actually
trying it, doesn't it include 'multiple smaller packages' that you can
either install all of, or pieces of?

As to FreeBSD vs Linux ... I don't have enough experience with Linux and
how the packages work over there, but I don't believe that if someone were
to download/package a plphp SRPM (or package) that they would include the
whole 11MB tar file, would they? Or would they just package up that
component which is applicable and have dependencies on other packages?

Hell, let's go at it from the other side of the coin ... you talk about
how fast your connection is to download it ... but it has to come from
somewhere ... which is more 'mirror friendly'? Making everyone download
11MB at a time for a, what would plPHP be, 100k directory structure, or
give them a 50k compressed tar file to download to get the component they
require? I'm basing that estimate on how big the existing pls are in the
source tree, so I may be high/low on the real size of plphp ...

The point is that *if* something can be build using existing
libraries/headers on the machine, without requiring the full source tree
to build it, then providing the option to the downloader/packager/port to
get the smaller piece is "A Good Thing" ... the only person that has made
a compelling argument why PLs should be in the core CVS *at this time* is
Tom (as regards the API changing, and its generally easier for him to
modify the PLs then having the "maintainers" learn the changes), and that
makes sense ... but as far as "packaging" on our end is concerned, if we
can split off 'stand alone distributions', then that is what we should be
looking at doing ...

Hell ... my "dream" is to see a libpq-<version>.tar.gz distribution so
that I don't have to download the full server source code each time I want
to install onto a client machine ... and one of these days I'll figure out
how to do it ...

----
Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy(at)hub(dot)org Yahoo!: yscrappy ICQ: 7615664