Обсуждение: Showstopper desktop runtime issue

All,

As you know, the 3.0 release is currently on hold as we discovered late yesterday that the re-vamped desktop runtime will not run on Gnome 3.26 and later. This is because the GTK project, and later Gnome, have removed support for the System Tray on which the new runtime relies. 

They have replaced it with a notification mechanism, however this doesn't really meet our needs as what we want is a place (the tray icon) to attach a menu to control the pgAdmin server; we don't really use notifications as such.

I see a number of possible ways around this:

1) Return to the previous runtime. I think this is at best a short-term solution, as the re-visited Annulen version of the QtWebKit seems to be getting little attention at the moment, and this would re-introduce many known bugs caused by WebKit.

2) Re-work the current runtime code to remove the tray icon, and utilise desktop/start menu items to signal the running instance to show the logs, configure the server, exit etc. This should work, but will be kinda klunky.

3) Put effort into polishing Joao's Electron based runtime. This might be a good long term solution as it would remove the need to have any C++ code of our own, and might allow us to use Electron's update mechanism to do software updates. The downsides are that we would lose support for dockable tabs (new windows only), and it wouldn't work on CentOS/RHEL 6 which we currently support.

Thoughts and comments please folks? How do we want to proceed? I'm currently leaning towards 2 for v3, and possibly moving to 3 in the long term.

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

All,

As you know, the 3.0 release is currently on hold as we discovered late yesterday that the re-vamped desktop runtime will not run on Gnome 3.26 and later. This is because the GTK project, and later Gnome, have removed support for the System Tray on which the new runtime relies. 

They have replaced it with a notification mechanism, however this doesn't really meet our needs as what we want is a place (the tray icon) to attach a menu to control the pgAdmin server; we don't really use notifications as such.

I see a number of possible ways around this:

1) Return to the previous runtime. I think this is at best a short-term solution, as the re-visited Annulen version of the QtWebKit seems to be getting little attention at the moment, and this would re-introduce many known bugs caused by WebKit.

2) Re-work the current runtime code to remove the tray icon, and utilise desktop/start menu items to signal the running instance to show the logs, configure the server, exit etc. This should work, but will be kinda klunky.

3) Put effort into polishing Joao's Electron based runtime. This might be a good long term solution as it would remove the need to have any C++ code of our own, and might allow us to use Electron's update mechanism to do software updates. The downsides are that we would lose support for dockable tabs (new windows only), and it wouldn't work on CentOS/RHEL 6 which we currently support.

Thoughts and comments please folks? How do we want to proceed? I'm currently leaning towards 2 for v3, and possibly moving to 3 in the long term.

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

Hi,

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 3:19 PM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

All,

As you know, the 3.0 release is currently on hold as we discovered late yesterday that the re-vamped desktop runtime will not run on Gnome 3.26 and later. This is because the GTK project, and later Gnome, have removed support for the System Tray on which the new runtime relies. 

They have replaced it with a notification mechanism, however this doesn't really meet our needs as what we want is a place (the tray icon) to attach a menu to control the pgAdmin server; we don't really use notifications as such.

I see a number of possible ways around this:

1) Return to the previous runtime. I think this is at best a short-term solution, as the re-visited Annulen version of the QtWebKit seems to be getting little attention at the moment, and this would re-introduce many known bugs caused by WebKit.

2) Re-work the current runtime code to remove the tray icon, and utilise desktop/start menu items to signal the running instance to show the logs, configure the server, exit etc. This should work, but will be kinda klunky.

3) Put effort into polishing Joao's Electron based runtime. This might be a good long term solution as it would remove the need to have any C++ code of our own, and might allow us to use Electron's update mechanism to do software updates. The downsides are that we would lose support for dockable tabs (new windows only), and it wouldn't work on CentOS/RHEL 6 which we currently support.

Thoughts and comments please folks? How do we want to proceed? I'm currently leaning towards 2 for v3, and possibly moving to 3 in the long term.

As per our previous efforts on Qt's web rendering framework, I am not in favor of adding it again as it add lots of dependency and complexity. 

I would suggest to go for option 2 - To re-work the current runtime code and find out how to get already running instance of pgadmin4.

All,

As you know, the 3.0 release is currently on hold as we discovered late yesterday that the re-vamped desktop runtime will not run on Gnome 3.26 and later. This is because the GTK project, and later Gnome, have removed support for the System Tray on which the new runtime relies. 

They have replaced it with a notification mechanism, however this doesn't really meet our needs as what we want is a place (the tray icon) to attach a menu to control the pgAdmin server; we don't really use notifications as such.

I see a number of possible ways around this:

1) Return to the previous runtime. I think this is at best a short-term solution, as the re-visited Annulen version of the QtWebKit seems to be getting little attention at the moment, and this would re-introduce many known bugs caused by WebKit.

2) Re-work the current runtime code to remove the tray icon, and utilise desktop/start menu items to signal the running instance to show the logs, configure the server, exit etc. This should work, but will be kinda klunky.

3) Put effort into polishing Joao's Electron based runtime. This might be a good long term solution as it would remove the need to have any C++ code of our own, and might allow us to use Electron's update mechanism to do software updates. The downsides are that we would lose support for dockable tabs (new windows only), and it wouldn't work on CentOS/RHEL 6 which we currently support.

Thoughts and comments please folks? How do we want to proceed? I'm currently leaning towards 2 for v3, and possibly moving to 3 in the long term.

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

Hello Hackers,

Here is our take on the 3 options present:

1) QtWebkit and QtWebEngine

Pros:

- Webkit is a mature technology that as been around for some time

- Apparently the Fork of Webkit we were using as been catching up

Cons:

- We are using a Fork

- It is to far behind of the today browsers and the competition keep evolving making it even harder for them to catch up

- Problems with the environment from the past, lagginess, lack of support

2) Rework runtime to find a running PGAdmin and attach to it

Pros:

- We already made the big move from Webkit to this version

- Add smarts to the application to do not run itself if it is already running, or kill the currently running application 

Cons:

- More C++ code thrown around

- Add more dependency on our QT application

- Have specific code for Gnome, not even a OS version but a window manager

3) Electron

Pros:

- Full Javascript runtime, no more C++ code to handle

- Self packaging for all the environments

Cons:

- No fully supported on Linux based OS with old libstdc++, (This might solve the problem: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/312)

- CPU/RAM high utilization (Found a issues around and the majority of them have solutions like CSS animations running or settings on the created windows)

- Electron does not support tabs by default, only HTML tabs

After combing through these options with some pros and cons  here are my thoughts:

1) This options was always cluncky from the beginning, the fact that we are working with a browser that is currently 26k commits behind Webkit:master is concerning. So I do not believe this is a viable option. As a personal opinion is we need to release fast, then we should go with what we have now and not go back to this option.

2) This option is not very appealing to me, because we would be pilling code into the QT portion of the application, that I hope we remove in the future, that currently is untested to solve a problem caused by a Window Manager......

I would be more in favor of creating a Application Indicator that would support 2 actions, Kill running pgAdmins and launch the browser to access them. There is a lot of interesting websites that talk about this, and how to develop. I had to download one to have a docker indicator..... But as I said in a previous thread, I believe that this should be a 3rd party application and not a first class citizen on pgAdmin, as the majority of the ones that I found are.

3) Electron can to play, first when we though about removing QTWebkit, because it always packs a browser with it and also and there is a very big Open Source Community being it. It came back again when when we saw that we were ready to ditch the browser. (As a personal note I dislike applications that I install in my machine and pop browser open to do anything, this is a personal issue that I would like to see if it was shared by others that was why we decided to park Electron for a second time. Because if our users are ok with it there is no need to add extra complexity to the product)

The most interesting thing about the cons that I found in Electron there is an issue open for them and a bunch of different solutions to try to handle it, or even advises on how to handle it. This option also allow us to focus less on browser compatibility as the main target of our development will become Chromium which is the base of browsers like UC Browser, Vivaldi, Opera, Google Chrome.

As you could see from my long long email, I am biased towards options 3, not because I started the push for it, but because I believe it is the right step for this product. This being said, I think that releasing now with this current issue is Ok as a first step to somewhere.

Hello Hackers,

Here is our take on the 3 options present:

1) QtWebkit and QtWebEngine 

Pros:

- Webkit is a mature technology that as been around for some time

- Apparently the Fork of Webkit we were using as been catching up

Cons:

- We are using a Fork

- It is to far behind of the today browsers and the competition keep evolving making it even harder for them to catch up

- Problems with the environment from the past, lagginess, lack of support

2) Rework runtime to find a running PGAdmin and attach to it

Pros:

- We already made the big move from Webkit to this version

- Add smarts to the application to do not run itself if it is already running, or kill the currently running application 

Cons:

- More C++ code thrown around

- Add more dependency on our QT application

- Have specific code for Gnome, not even a OS version but a window manager

3) Electron

Pros:

- Full Javascript runtime, no more C++ code to handle

- Self packaging for all the environments

Cons:

- No fully supported on Linux based OS with old libstdc++, (This might solve the problem: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/312)

- CPU/RAM high utilization (Found a issues around and the majority of them have solutions like CSS animations running or settings on the created windows)

- Electron does not support tabs by default, only HTML tabs

After combing through these options with some pros and cons  here are my thoughts:

1) This options was always cluncky from the beginning, the fact that we are working with a browser that is currently 26k commits behind Webkit:master is concerning. So I do not believe this is a viable option. As a personal opinion is we need to release fast, then we should go with what we have now and not go back to this option.

2) This option is not very appealing to me, because we would be pilling code into the QT portion of the application, that I hope we remove in the future, that currently is untested to solve a problem caused by a Window Manager......

I would be more in favor of creating a Application Indicator that would support 2 actions, Kill running pgAdmins and launch the browser to access them. There is a lot of interesting websites that talk about this, and how to develop. I had to download one to have a docker indicator..... But as I said in a previous thread, I believe that this should be a 3rd party application and not a first class citizen on pgAdmin, as the majority of the ones that I found are.

3) Electron can to play, first when we though about removing QTWebkit, because it always packs a browser with it and also and there is a very big Open Source Community being it. It came back again when when we saw that we were ready to ditch the browser. (As a personal note I dislike applications that I install in my machine and pop browser open to do anything, this is a personal issue that I would like to see if it was shared by others that was why we decided to park Electron for a second time. Because if our users are ok with it there is no need to add extra complexity to the product)

The most interesting thing about the cons that I found in Electron there is an issue open for them and a bunch of different solutions to try to handle it, or even advises on how to handle it. This option also allow us to focus less on browser compatibility as the main target of our development will become Chromium which is the base of browsers like UC Browser, Vivaldi, Opera, Google Chrome.

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 3:57 PM, Joao De Almeida Pereira <jdealmeidapereira@pivotal.io> wrote:

Hello Hackers,

Here is our take on the 3 options present:

This looks like a good summary, so I'm going to pick this one to comment on :)

 

1) QtWebkit and QtWebEngine 

Pros:

- Webkit is a mature technology that as been around for some time

- Apparently the Fork of Webkit we were using as been catching up

Cons:

- We are using a Fork

- It is to far behind of the today browsers and the competition keep evolving making it even harder for them to catch up

- Problems with the environment from the past, lagginess, lack of support

Yeah, this one hasn't exactly caused a "little" set of complaints so far. It might be workable for absolute stop-gap, but not beyond that.

 

2) Rework runtime to find a running PGAdmin and attach to it

Pros:

- We already made the big move from Webkit to this version

- Add smarts to the application to do not run itself if it is already running, or kill the currently running application 

Cons:

- More C++ code thrown around

- Add more dependency on our QT application

- Have specific code for Gnome, not even a OS version but a window manager

Annoying as it is, I think this is the least bad option at this point.

3) Electron

Pros:

- Full Javascript runtime, no more C++ code to handle

- Self packaging for all the environments

Cons:

- No fully supported on Linux based OS with old libstdc++, (This might solve the problem: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/312)

Losing support for things like RHEL6 would make it completely unworkable for several of my largest customers. Particularly in large enterprise organisations, this would be a very substantial issue.

 

- CPU/RAM high utilization (Found a issues around and the majority of them have solutions like CSS animations running or settings on the created windows)

This does sound bad. But do we actually know if this is worse in Electron than it is in the option #2? I mean sure, we point to things like Slack, but that may not be because of electron, it may be because the app running inside it?

 

- Electron does not support tabs by default, only HTML tabs

I think that also makes it a showstopper. This was another one of the main complaints I have personally heard from people going from pgadmin3 -> pgadmin4, and enough to make people not want to use it at all. It would be really bad to go back to that.

After combing through these options with some pros and cons  here are my thoughts:

1) This options was always cluncky from the beginning, the fact that we are working with a browser that is currently 26k commits behind Webkit:master is concerning. So I do not believe this is a viable option. As a personal opinion is we need to release fast, then we should go with what we have now and not go back to this option.

Yeah, that option definitely has no future long-term.

 

2) This option is not very appealing to me, because we would be pilling code into the QT portion of the application, that I hope we remove in the future, that currently is untested to solve a problem caused by a Window Manager......

I would be more in favor of creating a Application Indicator that would support 2 actions, Kill running pgAdmins and launch the browser to access them. There is a lot of interesting websites that talk about this, and how to develop. I had to download one to have a docker indicator..... But as I said in a previous thread, I believe that this should be a 3rd party application and not a first class citizen on pgAdmin, as the majority of the ones that I found are.

I can't comment on the specific ways to sort it out, but I think *basing* things in option 2 is by far the best option. If it's just an additional add-on that can be made a dependency of the packages it's not a huge problem (provided this add-on is available on the major platforms like rhel, ubuntu, debian of course)

 

3) Electron can to play, first when we though about removing QTWebkit, because it always packs a browser with it and also and there is a very big Open Source Community being it. It came back again when when we saw that we were ready to ditch the browser. (As a personal note I dislike applications that I install in my machine and pop browser open to do anything, this is a personal issue that I would like to see if it was shared by others that was why we decided to park Electron for a second time. Because if our users are ok with it there is no need to add extra complexity to the product)

The most interesting thing about the cons that I found in Electron there is an issue open for them and a bunch of different solutions to try to handle it, or even advises on how to handle it. This option also allow us to focus less on browser compatibility as the main target of our development will become Chromium which is the base of browsers like UC Browser, Vivaldi, Opera, Google Chrome.

Please don't ever give up browser independence for the *web* version of pgadmin. Don't be That Project (TM).

(And don't give up on proper tabs either, but I'm sure Electron might catch up in that eventually -- and the issue around RHEL6 will also go away eventually)

Hi

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 4:17 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 3:57 PM, Joao De Almeida Pereira <jdealmeidapereira@pivotal.io> wrote:

Hello Hackers,

Here is our take on the 3 options present:

This looks like a good summary, so I'm going to pick this one to comment on :)

:-)

 

 

1) QtWebkit and QtWebEngine 

Pros:

- Webkit is a mature technology that as been around for some time

- Apparently the Fork of Webkit we were using as been catching up

Cons:

- We are using a Fork

- It is to far behind of the today browsers and the competition keep evolving making it even harder for them to catch up

- Problems with the environment from the past, lagginess, lack of support

Yeah, this one hasn't exactly caused a "little" set of complaints so far. It might be workable for absolute stop-gap, but not beyond that.

Right.

 

 

2) Rework runtime to find a running PGAdmin and attach to it

Pros:

- We already made the big move from Webkit to this version

- Add smarts to the application to do not run itself if it is already running, or kill the currently running application 

Cons:

- More C++ code thrown around

- Add more dependency on our QT application

- Have specific code for Gnome, not even a OS version but a window manager

Annoying as it is, I think this is the least bad option at this point.

3) Electron

Pros:

- Full Javascript runtime, no more C++ code to handle

- Self packaging for all the environments

Cons:

- No fully supported on Linux based OS with old libstdc++, (This might solve the problem: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/312)

Losing support for things like RHEL6 would make it completely unworkable for several of my largest customers. Particularly in large enterprise organisations, this would be a very substantial issue.

That's good to know. There are clunky workarounds (shipping different libcs for example, but that potentially adds licensing issues).

Sidenote: It would only be an issue for desktop mode. Web mode should not be affected.

 

 

- CPU/RAM high utilization (Found a issues around and the majority of them have solutions like CSS animations running or settings on the created windows)

This does sound bad. But do we actually know if this is worse in Electron than it is in the option #2? I mean sure, we point to things like Slack, but that may not be because of electron, it may be because the app running inside it?

We don't know for sure, but we do know that Chrome in general is a bit of a hog. It's certainly not a stretch to think a combination of those things are why people (correctly) see browser based apps as being more resource hungry.

 

 

- Electron does not support tabs by default, only HTML tabs

I think that also makes it a showstopper. This was another one of the main complaints I have personally heard from people going from pgadmin3 -> pgadmin4, and enough to make people not want to use it at all. It would be really bad to go back to that.

To clarify; it would mean no tabs, but not single window. That was already working in the PoC. In other words, helpfiles, the debugger and query tools could all be opened in new windows, just not tabs on the same window that could be docked and un-docked.

I suspect for most people that would be enough.

 

After combing through these options with some pros and cons  here are my thoughts:

1) This options was always cluncky from the beginning, the fact that we are working with a browser that is currently 26k commits behind Webkit:master is concerning. So I do not believe this is a viable option. As a personal opinion is we need to release fast, then we should go with what we have now and not go back to this option.

Yeah, that option definitely has no future long-term.

 

2) This option is not very appealing to me, because we would be pilling code into the QT portion of the application, that I hope we remove in the future, that currently is untested to solve a problem caused by a Window Manager......

I would be more in favor of creating a Application Indicator that would support 2 actions, Kill running pgAdmins and launch the browser to access them. There is a lot of interesting websites that talk about this, and how to develop. I had to download one to have a docker indicator..... But as I said in a previous thread, I believe that this should be a 3rd party application and not a first class citizen on pgAdmin, as the majority of the ones that I found are.

I can't comment on the specific ways to sort it out, but I think *basing* things in option 2 is by far the best option. If it's just an additional add-on that can be made a dependency of the packages it's not a huge problem (provided this add-on is available on the major platforms like rhel, ubuntu, debian of course)

It would just be a modified version of what we have. Instead of having an icon in the system tray, we'd probably have multiple Start Menu icons to replace the tray icon menu. They would have to signal a running instance to do something, or become a new instance and then do the something if nothing is running already.

 

 

3) Electron can to play, first when we though about removing QTWebkit, because it always packs a browser with it and also and there is a very big Open Source Community being it. It came back again when when we saw that we were ready to ditch the browser. (As a personal note I dislike applications that I install in my machine and pop browser open to do anything, this is a personal issue that I would like to see if it was shared by others that was why we decided to park Electron for a second time. Because if our users are ok with it there is no need to add extra complexity to the product)

The most interesting thing about the cons that I found in Electron there is an issue open for them and a bunch of different solutions to try to handle it, or even advises on how to handle it. This option also allow us to focus less on browser compatibility as the main target of our development will become Chromium which is the base of browsers like UC Browser, Vivaldi, Opera, Google Chrome.

Please don't ever give up browser independence for the *web* version of pgadmin. Don't be That Project (TM).

Not on my watch!

 

(And don't give up on proper tabs either, but I'm sure Electron might catch up in that eventually -- and the issue around RHEL6 will also go away eventually)

RHEL 6 is in support until 2024, though it's already halfway through the maintenance 2 phase. It's definitely going, but we really don't know how many folks might still be using it in production on systems they're updating and using pgAdmin on. That last bit is important; many folks will continue to run production servers on RHEL/CentOS 6 for years, but how many are using them for client-side stuff or actively updating things like pgAdmin on them? 

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

2) This option is not very appealing to me, because we would be pilling code into the QT portion of the application, that I hope we remove in the future, that currently is untested to solve a problem caused by a Window Manager......

I would be more in favor of creating a Application Indicator that would support 2 actions, Kill running pgAdmins and launch the browser to access them. There is a lot of interesting websites that talk about this, and how to develop. I had to download one to have a docker indicator..... But as I said in a previous thread, I believe that this should be a 3rd party application and not a first class citizen on pgAdmin, as the majority of the ones that I found are.

I can't comment on the specific ways to sort it out, but I think *basing* things in option 2 is by far the best option. If it's just an additional add-on that can be made a dependency of the packages it's not a huge problem (provided this add-on is available on the major platforms like rhel, ubuntu, debian of course)

It would just be a modified version of what we have. Instead of having an icon in the system tray, we'd probably have multiple Start Menu icons to replace the tray icon menu. They would have to signal a running instance to do something, or become a new instance and then do the something if nothing is running already.

3) Electron

Pros:

- Full Javascript runtime, no more C++ code to handle

- Self packaging for all the environments

Cons:

- No fully supported on Linux based OS with old libstdc++, (This might solve the problem: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop/issues/312)

Losing support for things like RHEL6 would make it completely unworkable for several of my largest customers. Particularly in large enterprise organisations, this would be a very substantial issue.

That's good to know. There are clunky workarounds (shipping different libcs for example, but that potentially adds licensing issues).

Sidenote: It would only be an issue for desktop mode. Web mode should not be affected.

- CPU/RAM high utilization (Found a issues around and the majority of them have solutions like CSS animations running or settings on the created windows)

This does sound bad. But do we actually know if this is worse in Electron than it is in the option #2? I mean sure, we point to things like Slack, but that may not be because of electron, it may be because the app running inside it?

We don't know for sure, but we do know that Chrome in general is a bit of a hog. It's certainly not a stretch to think a combination of those things are why people (correctly) see browser based apps as being more resource hungry.

- Electron does not support tabs by default, only HTML tabs

I think that also makes it a showstopper. This was another one of the main complaints I have personally heard from people going from pgadmin3 -> pgadmin4, and enough to make people not want to use it at all. It would be really bad to go back to that.

To clarify; it would mean no tabs, but not single window. That was already working in the PoC. In other words, helpfiles, the debugger and query tools could all be opened in new windows, just not tabs on the same window that could be docked and un-docked.

I suspect for most people that would be enough.

3) Electron can to play, first when we though about removing QTWebkit, because it always packs a browser with it and also and there is a very big Open Source Community being it. It came back again when when we saw that we were ready to ditch the browser. (As a personal note I dislike applications that I install in my machine and pop browser open to do anything, this is a personal issue that I would like to see if it was shared by others that was why we decided to park Electron for a second time. Because if our users are ok with it there is no need to add extra complexity to the product)

The most interesting thing about the cons that I found in Electron there is an issue open for them and a bunch of different solutions to try to handle it, or even advises on how to handle it. This option also allow us to focus less on browser compatibility as the main target of our development will become Chromium which is the base of browsers like UC Browser, Vivaldi, Opera, Google Chrome.

Please don't ever give up browser independence for the *web* version of pgadmin. Don't be That Project (TM). 

Not on my watch!

(And don't give up on proper tabs either, but I'm sure Electron might catch up in that eventually -- and the issue around RHEL6 will also go away eventually)

RHEL 6 is in support until 2024, though it's already halfway through the maintenance 2 phase. It's definitely going, but we really don't know how many folks might still be using it in production on systems they're updating and using pgAdmin on. That last bit is important; many folks will continue to run production servers on RHEL/CentOS 6 for years, but how many are using them for client-side stuff or actively updating things like pgAdmin on them? 

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 12:28 PM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

(And don't give up on proper tabs either, but I'm sure Electron might catch up in that eventually -- and the issue around RHEL6 will also go away eventually)

RHEL 6 is in support until 2024, though it's already halfway through the maintenance 2 phase. It's definitely going, but we really don't know how many folks might still be using it in production on systems they're updating and using pgAdmin on. That last bit is important; many folks will continue to run production servers on RHEL/CentOS 6 for years, but how many are using them for client-side stuff or actively updating things like pgAdmin on them? 

RHEL 6 is the #1 OS for GPDB so if we have customers installing server side or wanting to we'd be on this pretty quickly. 

As an aside, I'm interested in who and how people are using the Linux version. How many are using Linux on the desktop and how many are installing the server. My assumption is that people using the linux distro are installing the server but I have no actual information to base that on. 

Hello Hackers

In the PoC we did with Electron last month this was the point where we stopped

What did we accomplish:

 - Use Electron as a runtime and packaging solution for the application

 - Support opening new windows when the preferences ask for them

 - Make the application generally work

 - Use Chrome as a default browser for the application

 - Building scripts for all platforms using `yarn`, please review Readme

 - The packaged Python version is 3.6 to Mac and Linux, and 3.4 to Windows

 - In our point of view it is a simpler way to generate the installers

Work in progress:

 - No random port for the server, so you can only start 1 instance per machine

 - Tab support, there is no native support for tabs in Electron. It is possible to do that, and eventually you will see a option in the menu to create a new tab, but for this PoC we decided to disable the creation of tabs. Tabs need to be implemented using HTML and cannot be ripped of from the current window, like in Chrome

 - Did not test in CentOS, but tested in Ubuntu and it is working (We tried but the electron required GLIBC 2.25 that was not on the version of CentOS that we had)

 - In Linux despite the fact that we close the window, the application is still running and need to be killed by hand

 - We didn't test Debugger opening in new window

 - Loading screen has no reference to pgAdmin

 - No logging file for the runtime

 - Windows we are using python 3.4 and using prior version of psycopg2 2.5.6 and pycrypto 2.6.1 (The version of psycopg2 is not the correct one, this is because we couldn't find a precompile version of psycopg2)

 - This is just a spike and the code looks pretty messy. This need to be changed in order to make it more readable and have some tests around it

 - Murtuza and Fahar were not able to run the application in Windows

 - Khushboo was not able to run Ubuntu version

Given this was the status at the time, we need to pick and choose what we really want to implement right out of the box and what could be postponed. In order to generate Windows build and ensure that the Linux build is working we need so help. If we could have access to the machines that you use to build pgAdmin or access to the venv folder that is generated in these machines we could try to create a build from that.

The changes we produced still applies cleanly on master and can be found in: https://github.com/greenplum-db/pgadmin4/tree/electron-over-master

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 4:28 PM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

2) This option is not very appealing to me, because we would be pilling code into the QT portion of the application, that I hope we remove in the future, that currently is untested to solve a problem caused by a Window Manager......

I would be more in favor of creating a Application Indicator that would support 2 actions, Kill running pgAdmins and launch the browser to access them. There is a lot of interesting websites that talk about this, and how to develop. I had to download one to have a docker indicator..... But as I said in a previous thread, I believe that this should be a 3rd party application and not a first class citizen on pgAdmin, as the majority of the ones that I found are.

I can't comment on the specific ways to sort it out, but I think *basing* things in option 2 is by far the best option. If it's just an additional add-on that can be made a dependency of the packages it's not a huge problem (provided this add-on is available on the major platforms like rhel, ubuntu, debian of course)

It would just be a modified version of what we have. Instead of having an icon in the system tray, we'd probably have multiple Start Menu icons to replace the tray icon menu. They would have to signal a running instance to do something, or become a new instance and then do the something if nothing is running already.

Of course, another option here might be to figure out that we're running under Gnome/GTK at runtime, and if so, create an indicator icon and menu instead of the tray icon. That is, apparently, what Skype and other similar apps do now. The indicator icons go on the right of the top menu bar (kinda like where tray icons go on macOS).