Re: one click install?

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On 6/12/07, Andrej Ricnik-Bay wrote:
> On 6/13/07, Andrew Hammond wrote:
> > The problem here is that there aren't really very many defined
> > defaults, or that these defaults vary (sometimes greatly) between the
> > different flavors of UNIX. For example, please tell me:
> >
> > 1) Where should PGDATA default to?
> > 2) How do you want to handle logging output from the postmaster? There
> > are plenty of options...
> > 3) Where should those log files get written?
> > 4) For 1 and 3, will that support multiple major versions of
> > PostgreSQL? (ie, can I have 8.2.latest and 8.1.latest installed at the
> > same time)
> > 5) How about multiple postmasters (on different ports)?
> Exactly :} ... all very good points... and then there's still the
> ownerships of processes and directories/files, and their perms.
> And integration with the init-scripts. And how e.g. the environment
> variables for users should be handled.
>
> > I think that the community would be well served by standardizing on
> > these things, at least for basic installations.
> But whose decision should that be?
> The postgres' developers?
> I think that the defaults that the configure script suggests are
> quite sane, and happily use them in my Slackware installations.

They're reasonable for a system which only wants a single version of
the binaries installed at any given time. Generally I want to have at
least two binaries on a production server at any given time: the one
I'm running and either the one I'm upgrading to or the one I just
upgraded from. Adding slony into the mix makes things even more
complicated along those lines.

> Linux File system Hierarchy standards? Which major distro(s)? And
> what about the BSDs (or the commercial Unices supported)?

I think a cage match would be a good way to settle this, and we could
use money collected by selling the even to pay-per-view to fund
development of Optimizer Hints.

Seriously though, just having some suggestions about where these
things belong in the docs wouldn't hurt and might actually lead to
some convergence.

> And while at it: who would define what a "basic installation" is? :)

I'd be willing to take a stab at that one (since it's pretty easy).

A basic installation is any install where the person or software doing
the install doesn't care about anything more than "getting postgres
running" (NB: no mention of version numbers, performance requirements,
or... well... anything a serious use would care about).

Andrew
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