www.pgaccess.org - the official story (the way I saw it)

Hello everybody,

The last message of Chris helped me a lot.

Let me give a short summary why do we (www.pgaccess.org) do what we do.

What are the motives behind and what is the goal.

My company needed pgaccess exactly because of the nice visual 'schema'. The
'schema', however, did not behave well if you give it 20-30 tables, so we
asked Teo if he plans to patch this. The last official update on the site of
Teo is from January 2001. Since then - if there have been patches, they have
remained somehow unannounced. Teo said he has no time and we fixed it. We
sent Teo patches several times and he came back with the following e-mail -

> From: Constantin Teodorescu [mailto:teo(at)flex(dot)ro]
> Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 11:16 PM
> To: Iavor Raytchev
> Cc: Boyan Dzambazov; bartus(dot)l(at)bitel(dot)hu; cmaj(at)freedomcorpse(dot)info
> Subject: Re: Future PgAccess development
>
> Dear Iavor, Boyan, Bartus, Chris
>
> I am writing to you all because in the last days I have received from
> all of you different patches and enhancements to PgAccess:
>
> - Iavor & Boyan in schema module
> - Bartus in function handling
> - Chris in report module
>
> Thank you all for your work and for developing PgAccess.
>
> For the moment, it's impossible to me to receive patches, maintain and
> push a new version (0.99) of PgAccess. I am involved in a lot of other
> projects and I have no free time.
>
> Furthermore, I am not familiar with the CVS and I have no free time to
> learn something new right now.
>
> I ask you to join your efforts, to exchange between all of you the
> patches that you have done and to try to set up a web site where
> PgAccess development could continue in future. I don't know anything
> about Sourceforge but it seems that they do such a thing. I want to stay
> close to the discussions concerning the future of PgAccess and I want to
> contribute with ideas, suggestions. But I feel that I will have no time
> to build up a new release and I think that your enhancements should be
> included in the next PostgreSQL release.
>
> I have also some changes in the query builder in order to support the
> outer and inner join capabilities in PostgreSQL 7.x. but they are not
> finished.
>
> Another important thing will be the changes that have to be done in
> order to support table (row) editing without OID's because 7.2.x
> versions allow table creation without OID's and table viewing is not
> working any more.
>
> Thank you all , I'm waiting for your answers,
>
> Teo

To sum it up -

-> pgaccess has not been officially updated since January 2001

= there is no real interest in it or the interest is not public

-> the author has no time

= the project has no leader

-> there are several people actively working on it

= there is some interest

-> the author gives us the chance to bring life

= if we like it we must get it

So we did.

We took the www.pgaccess.org domain (on the name of Teo). We set up a
server. And we started searching for the latest pgaccess versioin to insert
it into the cvs.

First I thought Teo should have the latest version. He said - no, it should
be with the PostgreSQL distribution. I went there, but it did not seem very
fresh. Then I continued my investigation and wrote to the
webmaster(at)postgresql(dot)org - my goal was to really find all patches and
intersted people and to bring the project to some useful place. Vince
Vielhaber wrote back that I should ask the HACKERS.

So I did.

And now we are here.

We heard a lot of opinions from different sides.

I would make the following summary -

1] During the last 1 year there has not been an active interest in and/or
development of pgaccess. Or if it has been - it has not been very official.

2] Currently there are at least four people who actively need pgaccess and
write for it - Bartus, Chris, Boyan and myself.

3] To talk about pgaccess without talking about PostgreSQL is a nonsense -
pgaccess has one purpose and this is PostgreSQL.

4] PostgreSQL is too much bigger than pgaccess (organizationwize) - the
proximity kills pgaccess. PostgreSQL is PostgreSQL. It is great - that's why
we spent so much time trying to do something about it. Bug pgaccess is not
PostgreSQL - it is one of the great tools around PostgreSQL and must be
independent.

5] gborg is a mess (I hope I do not hurt anybody's feelings) - just see the
broken images on first page that have not been fixed for at least several
days. And the missing search. I have been searching in gborg for pgaccess
several times - and I could not find it. I have the feeling that before
gborg there was a very pretty postgresql.org style page with the projects -
what happened to it?

PROPOSAL

What pgaccess needs is some fresh air - it needs a small and fresh team. It
needs own web site, own cvs, own mailing list. So that the people who love
it, write for it and really need it can be easy to identify and to talk to.
This will not break its relationship to PostgreSQL in any way (see 3] above)

At the end - I am not experienced how decisions are taken in an open source
community - I have no idea what is next.

May be one can write a summary what are the bad sides of the above proposal.
And if there are no such really - we should just proceed and have this nice
tool alive and running.

Thanks everybody,

Iavor

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www.pgaccess.org