Re: PostgreSQL 8.4 development plan

"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:

> Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc> writes:
>> In terms of picking an SCM candidate, I don't think "time to install 
>> from source" is a legitimate concern. Installing from source is great, 
>> but if the package needs to be installed from source, it is not well 
>> enough supported by the community to be worth using.
>
> That is 100.0% wrong.  Some people want to install from source, and
> some don't have any choice because they are on platforms where there's
> not a prebuilt binary available.  I am *not* willing to say that we
> will blow off developers on any platform that some other project is
> choosing not to provide binaries for.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. I've never heard any
complaints about building svn from source before for *developers*. I think
that's just as easy as anything else. 

What I have heard in the distance past is that it was difficult to set up a
server. That isn't something developers would have to do. And in any case I
understood that to be mostly about how it used to depend on a web server which
is no longer true anyways.

> As a fairly well related example, note how CVSup never became the de
> facto standard, because it wasn't portable enough, or at least had made
> the wrong decisions about what to depend on.

This is all predicated on a bit of ridiculous FUD. Apply the logic in reverse
and it should be obvious. Subversion is a mature package being used by
thousands of open source projects. At this point I would hazard it's more
widely used than CVS amongst open source projects. Therefore it *doesn't* have
any poor choices of dependencies.

For what it's worth I think GIT is a better fit for our needs.

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