[Pljava-dev] Working on 1.4 beta release

On Nov 19, 2007 12:45 PM, Thomas Hallgren <thomas at tada.se> wrote:
> Kris Jurka wrote:
> > 1) What server versions to support? I was thinking of building binary
> > releases for 8.1 -> 8.3 for win32, linux-i386, linux-amd64, and perhaps
> > solaris-i386 as those are the platforms I have access to.
> >
> Personally, I think this is fairly ambitious for the PL/Java project. My
> take historically has been to provide win32 and linux-x86 only since I
> don't see the PL/Java project as a binary distributor.

Uh, if not us, then who? PL/Java is really cool technology that is
something of a pain to get to the point where you can actually use it
(esp on win32). Let's not compare with the built-in PLs. And yet I
really don't think there's anything that really *requires* it being so
fiddly.

I would really like to see, ideally, PL/Java installable by
yum/apt-get/pkg-get etc on unix-like systems. I think there's a bit of
work to do to get there, but it's not impossible. But I'll leave
discussion on that for another thread.

> The permutations tend to grow and the task of maintaining all of them becomes significant.

Well, there are three variables, right? Postgres version, JVM version
and operating system/architecture, which I'll just call "platform".
I'm pretty sure I was able to compile pljava against a 1.5 JDK and run
it against a 1.6 one. So I don't think we should need to build it for
more than one JVM. The architectures that Kris mentioned sound good to
me, although I'd like to see Solaris/sparc in there as well if
possible (although like Kris, I don't have access to a sparc machine
atm), and perhaps MacOSX/x86 (since I've got a Macbook :) ). The
question then becomes: which pgsql versions do we want to support?
8.1-8.3?

I have a build script that can build pljava, run the test suite and
spit out binaries. It works (well I've tested it) on win32,
solaris/x86 and linux/x86. I'd be more than happy to build binaries
for all of those postgres versions for those platforms.

> A win32 binary is important because it requires a build environment that
> is less then intuitive to obtain and install correctly. For most other
> variants, I think a good instruction on how to build the binary is more
> important.

I agree that good docco on how to build the binaries is necessary, but
I definitely think we should be building binaries for common
platforms.

> > 2) What options should the server be built with? Since pljava picks up
> > these options via PGXS, the server configuration will affect the pljava
> > builds. Shoule --enable-debug be used? On a related note, should we try
> > to build the java code with -g if we find --enable-debug?

Build java code with -g, but pljava c code without debugging symbols I
reckon. If someone wants to debug pljava C code, they can build it
themselves. :)

> Ideally, all documentation should be kept in the CVS together with the
> source at some point. The use of the wiki for documenting was more an
> attempt to get collaboration going. It didn't happen. At some point I
> think all docs should be moved over and the wiki should point to some
> place where the doc is mirrored from the CVS but I don't think this need
> to happen for the 1.4 release.

I have some free time over the next few weeks, so I can have a go at
getting the wiki docs into some kind of source control. What source
format do we want? HTML? Docbook a la the main distribution? HTML
would obviously require less effort at build time, so I would probably
vote for it just on those grounds...

Cheers

Tom