Re: [PATCHES] Avahi support for Postgresql - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Hello,

Congratulations to the 8.3 release. No, that pre-release stress is over
I'd really like to put attention on my Avahi patches again.

Avahi/Bonjour/DNS-SD support[1] is very important, for integrating
Postgresql with modern desktop environments like OSX, GNOME, KDE: It's
very convenient to choose active DBMS servers in your local network from
a list, instead of memorizing "cryptic" connection parameters.

In Glom[2] we use Postgresql as DBMS of choice. This application would
greatly benefit from the possibility to choose central Postgresql
servers from an automatically updated list.

For OSX builds Postgresql already has DNS-SD support via Apple's Bonjour
library. For Linux Avahi[3] is the library of choice. Modern distribu-
tions ship it as main package, since both GNOME and KDE make use of it.
Since DNS-SD is a published  IETF standard [4] client applications
choose whatever DNS-SD implementation they like.

Applying this patche series would bring Postgresql's Linux port on par
with the OSX port in terms of desktop integration.

People not wanting DNS-SD support for their server can easily control
that feature via the "--with-avahi" configure scripts.

Thank your for attention,
Mathias

[1] http://www.dns-sd.org/
[2] http://www.glom.org/
[3] http://www.avahi.org/
[4] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2782.txt

Am Dienstag, den 27.11.2007, 11:19 +0100 schrieb Mathias Hasselmann:
> Postmaster already has code to announce its services via DNS-SD
> (ZeroConf) by using Apple's Bonjour API. This series of patches
> implements that capability on top of the Avahi library[1] which
> is free software, available for a wider variety of platforms.
>
> I've separated the change set into smaller pieces for easy review. Also
> I don't know, if the 4th patch adding subtypes describing Postgresql's
> capabilities is wanted by the Postgresql community. Being a desktop guy,
> using Postgresql as embedded database, I'd really like to see all of the
> patches merged, but I could imagine some opposition against the verbose
> nature of the subtypes patch.
>
> Each of the patches as a short description of its purpose.
>
> I couldn't find any ChangeLog files in the repository, and also I didn't
> invest much time in investigating how the HISTORY file of distribution
> tarballs is assembled. So if the repository contains file I should have
> modified for documenting my changes, I apologize for not updating them.
>
> [1] http://www.avahi.org/
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--
Mathias Hasselmann <mathias@openismus.com>
http://www.openismus.com/ - We can get it done.