Re: The case for the One-Click Installer

Dave Page wrote:
>
> From a QA perspective, probably 10% of the effort is OS X, 40% for
> Linux (mainly due to the sheer number of Linux distros), and 50% for
> the various versions of Windows and different configurations.
>
> From a development and support perspective, Linux & Mac probably
> equate to 10% of the effort each. The rest is Windows. The reason it
> tends to be so high, is the sheer number of different (and
> unpredictable) possible configurations of things like local and domain
> security policies, filesystem ACLs, effects of folder redirection,
> UAC, changes to utilities between different releases (eg. cacls vs.
> icacls), encoding and locale issues and oddities seen when running
> over terminal services sessions.
>
Dave, while you're showing some numbers about the installer hell (I know
why I always tried to keep away from installers and build systems...),
can you shed a little light on the "3 men working fulltime for some
months on the installer": how much of that work was purely postgres
related, and not reusable/sharable with EDB servers?

AFAIR EDB had the installer for their own products first, and in a
second step made it vanilla-postgres-aware. Of course there's absolutely
nothing wrong with that, that's how OSS works. But all that uncountable
windows issues apply to the EDB products as well, so a good bunch of
code as well as experience gained from tests is shared.
In this case, I guess pgsql8.4 is the first product tested, and edb8.4
will follow, gaining benefit from everything learned with pgsql. Again,
there's absolutely nothing wrong about that, unless you try to induce
the impression that EDB contributed manpower solely usable on
vanilla-pgsql with no direct benefit for edb products, in order to
justify why EDB should gain a premium marketing platform on the pgsql
distribution as kickback. Actually, I did get that impression.


Regards,
Andreas