Re: pgFoundry Download URLs

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> The concept I thought was interesting and wanted to explore for a minute was
> what a single page listing all the still active free add-on components in
> the briefest way possible would look like, as a potential replacement for
> the "place to find add-ons" component of pgFoundry.

'add-ons' is far too short sighted (much like the seemingly endless
mentions of CPAN). There are far more things than just add-ons to deal
with, and most of them could never be installed/managed with anything
like CPAN. Consider just Windows for a minute - we have database
add-ons (think contrib modules), applications such as pgAdmin, .NET
applications which may need certain versions of the .NET runtimes, IIS
applications, PHP apps that need a suitable Apache/PHP build, JBOSS
apps......

All those things are things we want to tell users about, to show off
the rich range of 'stuff' you can get to work with PostgreSQL. Most
don't even remotely fit into the add-ons class though.

> Maybe that page could
> be produced as a view out of the software catalogue, but it's missing two of
> the three critical pieces of data:  the version compatibility info and a
> *short* description.  You'd also have to add a lot more projects.

The short description could be added if people felt it was required.
It wasn't something that was wanted when we specced out the original
project.

The version compatibility info was one of the things we intentionally
left off. Why? Because after a we added a project/product to any of
the old pages that had anything like that kind of info, the data
invariably became out of date within a few months, and we simply
didn't (and still do not) have the manpower to keep those sort of
ever-changing details up to date.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com