Re: PostgreSQL 8.4 development plan

Tom Lane wrote:
>>> From a relative time to install from source standpoint it looks like
>>> this:
>>>
>>> CVS - 10 minutes (no external dependencies)
>>> GIT - 8 minutes (no external dependencies)
>>> Mercurial - 1 minute (depends on Python)
>>> Subversion - 4-6 hours (depends on a multitude of packages and will
>>> only work with specific versions which you
>>> learn about the hard way at build time).
>>>
>
> For those on platforms where SVN comes prepackaged, this might not be
> a big problem (except maybe for pulling in packages they don't want).
> For other developers this kind of thing could be a showstopper

As with anything you are likely to see on this issue, the above seems
highly suspect as hard numbers. In my own case I believe installing
Subversion is in the 10 minute time frame as well unless you get into
linking it with Apache and such which becomes unfair. Setting up any of
these solutions to be securely accessible from the network takes longer
than 10 minutes, so the numbers listed can only be for local installs,
and not all systems have Python. I think think Solaris 8 does?

In terms of picking an SCM candidate, I don't think "time to install
from source" is a legitimate concern. Installing from source is great,
but if the package needs to be installed from source, it is not well
enough supported by the community to be worth using.

Cheers,
mark

--
Mark Mielke <mark(at)mielke(dot)cc>