Re: apt.postgresql.org django app for www.postgresql.org

Re: Dave Page
>  I spent a bunch of time playing with this, as I intend to get repo
> browsing for both Yum and Apt onto the website.
>
> There was quite a bit of work to do to get it working with modern versions
> of Django and Python 3. Once I got through enough of that to start looking
> at the actual functionality what I found was *really* comprehensive.
> Unfortunately I think there's actually far more there than we should put on
> the main website.

Hi Dave,

thanks for picking this up.

It's well possible that I overshot the goal when I picked this up from
Adrian and put more and more info into it.

> - I think the QA section is clearly something that's aimed at you as
> maintainers of the apt repos. This definitely doesn't belong on the main
> website in my opinion.

Yeah that could go.

> - The madison interface is also interesting (academically), but I think is
> of little use to the vast majority of our users; I'm not even sure that the
> majority of Debian/Ubuntu users would know about rmadison.

I'm using that daily on the Debian archive, and it would help me a lot
if it were there. But we don't have to link it from every page, it's
just some API endpoint, we don't have to confuse users by linking to
it.

> - Similarly, I think the binary and source package pages are far more
> comprehensive than most of our users need or would care about.
>
> One of the biggest barriers of adoption to PostgreSQL is the perceived
> complexity, including that of getting it up and running. That's why I'm
> spending a lot of time at the moment trying to simplify and clarify the
> download and installation processes. I think what we have in this patch
> will simply be information overload for most of our users.

Ack. We can probably merge the source and binary views into a single
(bigger) page with less clutter that users would reach by default. We
can still have the detailed pages linked from that for users that need
to know the details. I'm sure we can find a way to do that that
doesn't spoil the complexity reduction idea.

> My suggestion is that we incorporate a relatively simple browser into the
> main website, which allows users to easily browse the available packages
> and see the details of them.

That'd be about what I said above, I think.

> I already have the repo scanning part of that
> done for both apt and yum, generating JSON output in a way that can be
> integrated with our download server sync process, which can load that into
> the website database.

Is that online somewhere?

> I would support a separate site (probably under apt.enterprisedb.com) that
> supports the level of functionality you have in your patch; and I think
> much, if not all of the code you currently have could be used for that.
> This could of course be linked from the main website.

Maintaining two sets of interfaces is probably too much. I think we
can get the "main" one to work, we just need to remove lots of
clutter.

> Obviously that should be apt.postgresql.org :-)

That got me for a second. ;)