Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP server?

Justin put them up, but I believe that any bug reports for them should be
sent to pgsql-ports@postgresql.org ...

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

Marc G. Fournier wrote:

Justin put them up, but I believe that any bug reports for them should be
sent to pgsql-ports@postgresql.org ...

Yep, that's the first "Proof of Concept" build, and it *prominently* has
a message at the start of the installation that says to email me with
any problems about it.

I'm open to suggestions for making a more visible way for people to know
how to contact us, if needed.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

There are Windows binaries on the PostgreSQL FTP server mirrors, for
example,

http://ftp.de.postgresql.org/mirror/postgresql/binary/v7.3.1/Windows/

that users are having problems with. Apparently there is no name or
address of any creator available. So who did this and would like to fix
the packaging?

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

Justin Clift writes:

Yep, that's the first "Proof of Concept" build, and it *prominently* has
a message at the start of the installation that says to email me with
any problems about it.

Maybe a so-called "Proof of Concept" build could be put into an area on
the FTP server that conveys that fact in the directory names (like "test"
or "contrib" or whatever). Because those who need a more production-grade
build will likely confuse this.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net

Peter Eisentraut wrote:

Justin Clift writes:

Yep, that's the first "Proof of Concept" build, and it *prominently* has
a message at the start of the installation that says to email me with
any problems about it.

Maybe a so-called "Proof of Concept" build could be put into an area on
the FTP server that conveys that fact in the directory names (like "test"
or "contrib" or whatever). Because those who need a more production-grade
build will likely confuse this.

That's probably not a bad idea.

It has warnings *all over it* (main window title, big warning messages
during the install, etc), but we know from experience that some people
don't read anything and just click the Next button until things finish.

Marc, what do you feel? How about a "testing" or "development" or
similar base directory on the website to put testing releases?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

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I'm open to suggestions for making a more visible way for people to know
how to contact us, if needed.

How about putting a README file in that directory as well, giving out
the same warnings and contact information that appears upon install?

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200303061015

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greg@turnstep.com wrote:
<snip>

How about putting a README file in that directory as well, giving out
the same warnings and contact information that appears upon install?

Thanks Greg, excellent suggestion.

Just added it to my personal ToDo list.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200303061015

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

What is this build, exactly? It is Jan's patch brough up to 7.3, or cygwin?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Justin Clift wrote:

greg@turnstep.com wrote:
<snip>

How about putting a README file in that directory as well, giving out
the same warnings and contact information that appears upon install?

Thanks Greg, excellent suggestion.

Just added it to my personal ToDo list.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200303061015

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

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-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

This is the 'proof of concept' cygwin windows build. Strangely, I have
a newer build than the one on the ftp server. Is there a binary version
of postgres with Jan's patch available?

Merlin

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Momjian [mailto:pgman@candle.pha.pa.us]
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 12:38 PM
To: Justin Clift
Cc: greg@turnstep.com; pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Who puts the Windows binaries on the FTP

server?

What is this build, exactly? It is Jan's patch brough up to 7.3, or
cygwin?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
--

-

Justin Clift wrote:

greg@turnstep.com wrote:
<snip>

How about putting a README file in that directory as well, giving

out

the same warnings and contact information that appears upon

install?

Thanks Greg, excellent suggestion.

Just added it to my personal ToDo list.

:)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200303061015

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people:

those

who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in

the

first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

---------------------------(end of

broadcast)---------------------------

TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
message can get through to the mailing list cleanly

--
Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
+  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
+  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania
19073

---------------------------(end of

broadcast)---------------------------

Merlin Moncure wrote:

This is the 'proof of concept' cygwin windows build. Strangely, I have
a newer build than the one on the ftp server. Is there a binary version
of postgres with Jan's patch available?

The only binary I know of Jan's work is 7.2 on peerdirect's web site. I
have the patch brough up to 7.3, and will be applying it in pieces this
month.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

Merlin Moncure wrote:

This is the 'proof of concept' cygwin windows build. Strangely, I have
a newer build than the one on the ftp server. Is there a binary version
of postgres with Jan's patch available?

Uh Oh.

When you say "newer version", what gives the feeling of it being newer?

In the "Proof of Concept" Windows series, there's only been that first
build. It's going to take some time for the next one as well, as the
Win2K PC it was developed on had a problem and had to wipe the hard
drive. (i.e. all of the packaging scripts, data, etc). :-/

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Merlin

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

Bruce Momjian wrote:

What is this build, exactly? It is Jan's patch brough up to 7.3, or cygwin?

It's a simplified installation package of 7.3.1 with cygwin. Put it
together so we can get a feel for the packaging issues we'll need to
take into account for the proper release of a 7.4 Windows version.

Getting the next version out the door is taking a bit more time than
anticipated though. :(

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

It's rumoured that Justin Clift once said:

It's a simplified installation package of 7.3.1 with cygwin. Put it
together so we can get a feel for the packaging issues we'll need to
take into account for the proper release of a 7.4 Windows version.

Yeah, but it won't will it? You're seeing all the normal Cygwin issues but
nicely hidden away I'll bet. Installing the native version will be easy,
as we won't be messing around with Cywin or CygIPC. I would expect to be
able to build an installer in about 15 minutes excluding the time taken to
make the installer's UI look purdy...
Regards, Dave.

Justin Clift wrote:

This is the 'proof of concept' cygwin windows build. Strangely, I

have

a newer build than the one on the ftp server. Is there a binary

version

of postgres with Jan's patch available?

Uh Oh.

When you say "newer version", what gives the feeling of it being

newer?

The timestamp of the file on the ftp server is 1/28/03. The timestamp
of file I previously dl'd (which I collected from whatever link you
posted on this list) is 2/3/03. However I downloaded the older version
and they are the same (same number of bytes, at least).

Merlin

Dave Page wrote:

It's rumoured that Justin Clift once said:

It's a simplified installation package of 7.3.1 with cygwin. Put it
together so we can get a feel for the packaging issues we'll need to
take into account for the proper release of a 7.4 Windows version.

Yeah, but it won't will it? You're seeing all the normal Cygwin issues but
nicely hidden away I'll bet. Installing the native version will be easy,
as we won't be messing around with Cywin or CygIPC. I would expect to be
able to build an installer in about 15 minutes excluding the time taken to
make the installer's UI look purdy...
Regards, Dave.

There's more to making PostgreSQL work on Windows than just the "pure
packaging" issues. We still have to figure out how we're going to
handle stuff like needed grep, sed, etc just for PostgreSQL to run
(they're required by initdb).

We're also going to need to have a good idea of what other nice features
could/should be packaged along with it. i.e.:

+ a GUI to control some things (installation/deinstallation of the
PostgreSQL Service, perhaps vacuuming, etc).

+ Shortcuts in the Program menu to things (PostgreSQL website(s),
online documentation, etc)

+ Which parts of the installation should be mandatory, and which should
be optional. i.e. Base server files should be mandatory, HTML docs
should be optional, perhaps include the ODBC driver as optional too.

Things like that.

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

Merlin Moncure wrote:

Justin Clift wrote:

<snip>

The timestamp of the file on the ftp server is 1/28/03. The timestamp
of file I previously dl'd (which I collected from whatever link you
posted on this list) is 2/3/03. However I downloaded the older version
and they are the same (same number of bytes, at least).

That's cool, it's probably just that the timestamp wasn't correctly
carried onto the FTP server.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Merlin

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

Dave Page wrote:

It's rumoured that Justin Clift once said:

There's more to making PostgreSQL work on Windows than just the "pure
packaging" issues. We still have to figure out how we're going to
handle stuff like needed grep, sed, etc just for PostgreSQL to run
(they're required by initdb).

I thought the idea was initdb would be rewritten in C. We cannot include
grep/sed etc as they're GPL...

I heard Peter mention that, but my email seems to be a tad spotty and I
haven't come across the rest of the conversation about it.

That would be really good of course, as it reduces the external
dependencies. :)

We're also going to need to have a good idea of what other nice
features could/should be packaged along with it. i.e.:

+ a GUI to control some things (installation/deinstallation of the
PostgreSQL Service, perhaps vacuuming, etc).

Hang on, I heard of a good one the other day... :-)

There's a couple of potentials. ;-)

+ Shortcuts in the Program menu to things (PostgreSQL website(s),
online documentation, etc)

Those are just decisions to make aren't they? They don't require a Cygwin
proof of concept.

Sure. But I hadn't thought about them until building the cygwin proof
of concept. Think of it as a "test run" to see what kind of things it
brought to mind. :)

Another thing is the international support. The Proof of Concept
version was a bad hack in that it forced installation into "C:\Program
Files\PostgreSQL". For non-english versions of Windows, they have
"C:\Program Files" being names to other things, dependant on the
language. This broke the installation of course. :(

With a proper installer (as you've mentioned), that shouldn't be a
problem as it should automatically install into the correct "PostgreSQL"
subdirectory of whatever the equivalent of "Program Files" is, on
whatever drive. Registry entries (if used) should properly match of course.

+ Which parts of the installation should be mandatory, and which
should
be optional. i.e. Base server files should be mandatory, HTML docs
should be optional, perhaps include the ODBC driver as optional too.

Likewise, these are decisions to make and then suitable programming of the
installer. Making bits optional should be trivial in any good installer.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that someone has finally built a
good Cygwin based package - I just don't think it answers many of the
issues that we will likely encounter.

No, but it brought some of them to light. :)

Regards, Dave.

PS. Is the source on the ftpsite - if not you'll have Jason after you
before long :-)

The source? It's the standard version of cygwin. It's just packaged
differently. :)

The packaging scripts themselves though have gone into the ether
forever, as the drive they were on was lost a few weeks ago (rebooted
one day and it didn't come back). :( If absolutely needed, we could
reverse engineer them back from the installation package. (painful)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi

It's rumoured that Justin Clift once said:

There's more to making PostgreSQL work on Windows than just the "pure
packaging" issues. We still have to figure out how we're going to
handle stuff like needed grep, sed, etc just for PostgreSQL to run
(they're required by initdb).

I thought the idea was initdb would be rewritten in C. We cannot include
grep/sed etc as they're GPL...

We're also going to need to have a good idea of what other nice
features could/should be packaged along with it. i.e.:

+ a GUI to control some things (installation/deinstallation of the
PostgreSQL Service, perhaps vacuuming, etc).

Hang on, I heard of a good one the other day... :-)

+ Shortcuts in the Program menu to things (PostgreSQL website(s),
online documentation, etc)

Those are just decisions to make aren't they? They don't require a Cygwin
proof of concept.

+ Which parts of the installation should be mandatory, and which
should
be optional. i.e. Base server files should be mandatory, HTML docs
should be optional, perhaps include the ODBC driver as optional too.

Likewise, these are decisions to make and then suitable programming of the
installer. Making bits optional should be trivial in any good installer.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that someone has finally built a
good Cygwin based package - I just don't think it answers many of the
issues that we will likely encounter.
Regards, Dave.

PS. Is the source on the ftpsite - if not you'll have Jason after you
before long :-)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Page" <dpage@vale-housing.co.uk>

I thought the idea was initdb would be rewritten in C. We cannot include
grep/sed etc as they're GPL...

I'd be happy to do this if it hasn't been done. After a quick perusal of the
script I think it would be very straightforward.

cheers

andrew

Justin Clift writes:

I thought the idea was initdb would be rewritten in C. We cannot include
grep/sed etc as they're GPL...

I heard Peter mention that, but my email seems to be a tad spotty and I
haven't come across the rest of the conversation about it.

I've started rewriting some of the shell scripts in C. initdb will be a
lot trickier. We'll see.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net