Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> Jan Wieck wrote:
>> Now fortunately, this spartanic tarball isn't what most users will
>> get if they select PostgreSQL in their OS distribution installer. So
>> the question would rather be *what is our recommendation for package
>> maintainers?* That collection is what hopefully most end users will
>> experience as the PostgreSQL database product, and that is the
>> picture we have to draw in our release announcement.
>
> Take a look at, say, KDE or GNOME.  Their software is split up in all
> kinds of ways.  Each little program has its own maintainer, version
> number, etc.  Yet, to the general public it surely seems like KDE and
> GNOME are pretty integrated.  Why is that?
>
> It's because above all these small parts there is an umbrella
> organization that provides services to each small part to make them
> look integrated, such as:
>
> - release management
> - security issue management
> - localization support
> - documentation support
> - bug tracking
> - packaging support
> - marketing support
> ... and more.
>
> We don't provide those services.  Back in the days when everything was
> one tarball, we provided those services in an integrated fashion by
> default, but I can understand why that system doesn't work beyond a
> certain size.  But by gborg or pgfoundry we don't provide these
> services either.  A developer that makes use of gborg basically just
> rents machine space and bandwidth with some preinstalled software that
> allows him to set up the above mentioned services for his own project.
> But that doesn't make it integrated.
>
> So, for the issue at hand, no matter how much we like replication,
> endorse slony, or respect Jan's work, it's not part of PostgreSQL, in
> the eyes of the public.  And a press release or three isn't going to
> fundamentally change that, because the facts don't back it up.

Do we not make some headway towards that with the work on pgxs?  I realize
that only addresses part of the problem, but it does make a start ...

How do we continue to 'bridge the gap', so to say?

pginstaller does, I think, a good job of it on the Windows platform, by
giving one interface to pull in multiple 'tools' ... any way of mirroring
this sort of thing in Unix?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664