Re: [CORE] Restore-reliability mode

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 7:35 AM, Geoff Winkless <pgsqladmin(at)geoff(dot)dj> wrote:

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

I think this is rather uncharitable. You don't include yum, zypper, or
apt-get anywhere in there, and I vaguely recall it took me quite a bit of
time to install all the prereqs in order to get it to compile several years
ago when I first started trying to compile it. And then even more time get
it to compile with several of the config flags I wanted. And then even
more time to get the docs to compile.

And now after I got all of that, when I try your code, it still doesn't
work. $(pg_config ....) seems to not quote things the way that configure
wants them quoted, or something. And the package from which I was using
pg_config uses more config options than I was set up for when compiling
myself, so I either have to manually remove the flags, or find more
dependencies (pam, xslt, ossp-uuid, tcl, tcl-dev, and counting). This is
not very fun, and I didn't even need to get bureaucratic approval to do any
of this stuff, like a lot of people do.

And then when I try to install it, it tries to overwrite some of the files
which were initially installed by the package manager in /usr/lib. That
doesn't seem good.

And how do I, as a hypothetical package manager user, start this puppy up?
Where is pg_ctlcluster? How does one do pg_upgrade between a
package-controlled data directory and this new binary?

And then when I find a bug, how do I know it is a bug and not me doing
something wrong in the build process, and getting the wrong .so to load
with the wrong binary or something like that?

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

If it isn't working, reports of it isn't working with error messages are
pretty helpful and don't take a whole lot of time. If it is working,
reports of that probably aren't terribly helpful without putting a lot more
work into it. But people might be willing to put a lot of work into, say,
performance regression testing it that is their area of expertise, if they
don' t also have to put a lot of work into getting the software to compile
in the first place, which is not their area.

Now I don't see a lot of evidence of beta testing from the public (i.e.
unfamiliar names) on -hackers and -bugs lists. But a lot of hackers report
things that "a client" or "someone on IRC" reported to them, so I'm willing
to believe that a lot of useful beta testing does go on, even though I
don't directly see it, and if there were alpha releases, why wouldn't it
extend to that?

>
> (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)
>

Right, and are the people who use apt-get to install everything likely to
know how to do that work?

Cheers,

Jeff