Re: Adding PGInstaller to the Downloads section

On Aug 28, 2018, at 1:06 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 1:50 PM, Umair Shahid <umair.shahid@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 4:11 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 28, 2018 at 1:01 PM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

Hi

Thanks, Dave, for picking that one up. I had it on my list to deal with but it somehow slipped out of my inbox.

On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 5:57 PM, Umair Shahid <umair.shahid@2ndquadrant.com>wrote:

Hi, 

Please find attached a patch to add PGInstaller to the Downloads section of postgresql.org. 

PGInstaller offers an easy way to install PostgreSQL. We have found this to be crucial to our customers who are used to GUI-based, click-n-point installers on Windows and at times on macOS. PGInstaller has evolved from 2UDA, a package that 2ndQuadrant has been working on for more than 3 years. 

2ndQuadrant is committed to developing and actively maintaining PGInstaller for PostgreSQL versions 9.5 and above. We have been releasing, and will continue to release, updates in sync with the PostgreSQL community, most recently announcing the minor release on 9-Aug. PGInstaller has also kept up with the Beta releases for PostgreSQL 11. 

The first issue that I can see (or more correctly, not see), is the source code. All packages on these pages need to be 100% Open Source, including the code required to build the packages themselves (but not necessarily the tools/compilers of course). Where can the code be found?

In fact, I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest another restructure. (which I've been thinking about for a while, but this makes it more current)

I think for the distribution specific ones, we should really only keep the community provided or recommended ones. That means on debian/ubuntu pages we keep only apt.pg.org and "included in distro". For redhat/ubuntu we keep only yum.pg.org and "included in distro". That goes for all the platforms that we have clear recommendations on.

The other installers, including this new one from 2ndquadrant, gets moved to "3rd party distributions" on https://www.postgresql.org/download/, which may now possibly need a sub-page with all of them on. (Incidentally, this is where 2UDA already is).

The remaining question then becomes Windows and Mac. My personal view is keep the EDB installer on the Windows one, but consider keeping postgres.app instead on Mac (along with references to things like homebrew) as that seems to resonate with what people actually want on that platform. But I'm not a Mac user myself, so somebody who is might have an argument for keeping others there instead.

I can understand keeping PGDG's apt and yum repositories as the community provided/recommended sources for distribution specific ones. I am not sure I understand the reasoning behind the Windows suggestion though. Are you proposing that the community starts recommending the use of EDB installers for Windows? 

The community has been doing that for years, on account of it being listed at the top of the page.

My main suggestion is that there should be *one* clear recommendation.

Whether it's the EDB one or another one is a separate discussion, but we've been recommending the EDB one for a long time and none of our users have (AFAIK) complained about it (except when download servers have been down. Personally I'd really like to see the binaries hosted on the postgresql.org servers instead, but again that's an at least partially separate discussion).