Re: Packaging pgAdmin 4

Hi

On Sat, Nov 27, 2021 at 7:27 PM Blake McBride <blake1024(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I've had ongoing difficulties installing pgAdmin 4. These difficulties
> have to do with the way pgAdmin is packaged and distributed.
>
> For example, I use LinuxMint and Manjaro. The pgAdmin distributions
> support neither. Although Mint is a derivative of Ubuntu, lsb_release -cs
> returns a value not usable by pgAdmin's distribution system. I had to
> tweak internal files to get it to work.
>
> I'd like to suggest using snap, flatpack, or AppImage. Using one of
> these, pgAdmin would be trivial to install on nearly any distro and on
> nearly any version of those distros. Secondly, you'd have to maintain far
> fewer builds.
>
> The only negative to using one of these is that the installations would be
> a bit larger. This is a very small penalty to get the portable and
> convenience these package managers provide.
>

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple. As I noted on the list a few
weeks ago:

---
Technologies like Flatpak make it significantly harder to maintain
applications like pgAdmin, and for system administrators to ensure their
systems are secure. This is primarily because they bundle third party
libraries within the application package, which means that every time there
is a security update to a library such as OpenSSL, we need to update the
package we distribute, and the system administrator can't simply do a yum
update or equivalent and be sure that their system is as secure as
possible. It also means end users need to install a separate package
management tool from the one that is native to their system.

So, whilst (if we had the resources) I wouldn't object to supporting
Flatpak and similar, I would certainly not want them to replace the
standard native packages as the primary offering.
---

--
Dave Page
Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com