Re: [CORE] Restore-reliability mode

On 6 June 2015 at 13:41, Sehrope Sarkuni <sehrope(at)jackdb(dot)com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Geoff Winkless <pgsqladmin(at)geoff(dot)dj>
> wrote:
> > To play devil's advocate for a moment, is there anyone who would
> genuinely be prepared to download
> > and install an alpha release who would not already have downloaded one
> of the nightlies? I only ask
> > because I assume that releasing an alpha is not zero-developer-cost and
> I don't believe that
> > there's a large number of people who would be happy to install something
> that's described as being
> > buggy and subject to change but are put off by having to type
> "configure" and "make".
>
> I fit into that category and I would guess there would be others as
> well. Having system packages available via an "apt-get install ..."
> lowers the bar significantly to try things out.

​But it also lowers the bar to the extent that you get the people who won't
read the todo list and end up complaining about the things that everyone
already knows about​.

> It's much easier to work into dev/test setups if there are system
> packages as it's just a config change to an existing script. Building
> from source would require a whole new workflow that I don't have time
> to incorporate.
>

​Really? You genuinely don't have time to paste, say:

mkdir -p ~/src/pgdevel
cd ~/src/pgdevel
wget https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/snapshot/dev/postgresql-snapshot.tar.bz2
tar xjf postgresql-snapshot.tar.bz2
​mkdir bld
​
cd bld
../postgresql-9.5devel/configure $(pg_config --configure | sed -e
's/\(pg\|postgresql[-\/]\)\(doc-\)\?9\.[0-9]*\(dev\)\?/\1\29.5dev/g')
make wor
​ld​
​make check
make world-install
​​

​and yet you think you have enough time to provide more than a "looks like
it's working" report to the developers?​

(NB the sed for the pg_config line will probably need work, it looks like
it should work on the two types of system I have here but I have to admit I
changed the config line manually when I built it)

> > Further, it seems to me that the number of people who won't roll their
> own who are useful as bug-finders is even smaller.
>
> That's probably true but they definitely won't find any bugs if they
> don't test at all.
>
> If it's possible to have automated packaging, even for just a subset
> of platforms, I think that'd be useful.
>

Well yes, automated packaging of the nightly build, that doesn't involve
the developers having to stop what they're doing to write official alpha
release docs or any of the other stuff that goes along with doing a
release, would be zero-impact on development (assuming the developers
didn't have to build or maintain the auto-packager) and therefore any
return (however small) would make it worthwhile.

Fancy building (and maintaining) the auto-packaging system, and managing a
mailing list for its users?

Geoff