Re: Official Windows Installer and Documentation

On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 6:42 PM Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2022 at 11:36:11PM +0200, Thomas Kellerer wrote:
> > David G. Johnston schrieb am 27.07.2022 um 21:21:
> > > And then there is the issue of file ownership.
> > >
> > > Assuming we want better documentation for this specific issue for
> > > back-patching what would that look like?
> > >
> > > Going forward should our installer be creating the postgres user for
> > > consistency with other platforms or not?
> >
> > Didn't the installer used to do that in earlier releases and that
> > was removed when Postgres was able to "drop privileges" when the
> > service is started?
> >
> > I remember a lot of problems around the specific Postgres service
> > account when that still was the case.
>
> Note that there's no "official" Windows installer, and companies providing
> one
> are free to implement it the way they want, which can contradict the
> official
> documentation. The download section of the website clearly says that this
> is a
> third-party installer.
>
> For now there's only the EDB installer that remains, but I think that some
> time
> ago there was 2 or 3 different providers.
>
> For the EDB installer, I'm not sure why or when it was changed, but it
> indeed
> used to have a dedicated local account and now relies on "Local System
> Account"
> or something like that. But IIRC, when it used to create a local account
> the
> name could be configured, so there was no guarantee of a local "postgres"
> account by then either.
>
>
Our technical definition aside, the fact is our users consider the sole EDB
installer to be official.

If the ultimate solution is to update:

https://www.enterprisedb.com/downloads/postgres-postgresql-downloads

to have its own installation and upgrade supplement to the official
documentation then I'd be fine with that. But as of now the "Installation
Guide" points back to the official documentation, which has no actual
distribution specific information while simultaneously reinforcing the fact
that it is an official installer.

I get sending people to the EDB web services team for download issues since
we don't host the binaries. That aspect of them being third-party doesn't
seem to be an issue.

But for documentation, given the current state of things, whether we amend
our docs or highly encourage the people who are benefiting financially from
being our de facto official Windows installer provider to provide separate
documentation to address this apparent short-coming that is harming our
image in the Windows community, I don't really care, as long as something
changes.

In the end the problem is ours and cannot be simply assigned to a
third-party. So let's resolve it here (on this list, whatever the
solution) where representatives from all parties are present.

David J.