Re: Switching to Homebrew as recommended Mac install?

On Apr 1, 2012, at 21:50, Jay Levitt <jay(dot)levitt(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Tom Lane wrote:
>> While you might not like the EDB installer, at least those
>> folks are active in the lists and accountable for whatever problems
>> their code has. Who in heck is responsible for the "homebrew"
>> packaging, and do they answer questions in the PG lists?

>
> Just for general knowledge... Who's responsible is whoever wants to be; homebrew is open source, and with a github-based workflow, it's trivial for them to accept pull requests. On the 1967 formulas (packages) in the repo, there have been 1759 contributors. I was volunteering to be the maintainer and liaison if we did this; I'm pretty good at email and IRC.
>
> It's actually pretty clever and elegant - homebrew itself uses git and github for formula updates and distribution, and is written in ruby1.8 which ships with all Macs. /usr/local is a git repo, "brew update" is mostly "git pull", and "brew search" checks for new pull requests if it doesn't find a matching formula. The whole thing's all of 1500 lines of code, and you saw what formulas look like.
>
> Jay
>
>

You seem highly approving of "homebrew" and seem willing to develop and support it. I guess the question to be asked is what requirements you would expect to have to meet before the Mac Downloads section would list your installer routine along with the three already present? Aside from that unless you are really intent on trying to prove yourself to be the best if you are trying to overcome shortcomings of the existing installers it would still be nice to let them know how you feel things could be improved for the community/user sub-set you belong to.

As a Windows developer (though production is on Linux) I get where you are coming from with respect to user permissions and the like - what is desirable in a development and in production do differ and so having different installation routines for them makes some sense. Until your developers go to install on the production server and do not realize that they should be doing something different in order to make the server more secure than their development environment.

From what I follow I think you have really good ideas and sound reasoning. You do not need permission to contribute to the community in the way you seek so what is it that you are really asking for? From the sound of things your primary focus is not in supporting the PostgreSQL community via providing services to others or developing new tools. When brew is replaced by something more popular do you think you will continue to maintain the recipie or is it going to end up stuck showing us how to install version 9.3 or earlier. I'm beyond my element here but the current installer maintainers are doing so in addition to their other, more regular, contributions. That said, the contribution, even if it did stall in the future, would still be welcomed and if it is found to be very useful someone would likely pickup the torch as long as it is released under the same terms as PostgreSQL itself.

Just trying to bridge an apparent gap since the original e-mail seems to have come across as too adversarial that the underlying thoughts have been overlooked. Trying to contribute in my own way with my current resources.

David J.