Re: [mail] Re: Windows Build System - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Thursday 30 January 2003 13:17, Vince Vielhaber wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > Vince, I would say that we, the developers of PostgreSQL, are then not
> > qualified to test our own releases for the reasons you mentioned that
> > Katie should not test her own releases.

> Don't twist what I said.  My statement about Katie was that she has a
> knowledge of the port and the OS to the point where there are things
> that she knows are wrong to do and would avoid doing it.

Then she would not be honestly testing, would she?

> admission they haven't been doing that.  All they've done is loaded it
> down and made sure it continued to work.  The other ports have a long
> history, the windows port has ZERO history.

Do we do powerfail testing on a unix-type port now?  That's not testing the 
port, incidentally, it's testing the OS, sync semantics aside.  Do we hold 
the other ports to the same standards?  Yes, the Win32 port is a substantial 
change from the Unix ports.  Yes, it needs robust testing.  But all the ports 
need that same grade of testing, not just Win32.  And that type of testing is 
not being rigorously done on any port now, unless it is being done by a few 
that aren't announcing that they are doing it.

And thanks to hardware write-back caching on many hard drives, powerfail 
testing may be moot regardless of OS or filesystem type.

>  If you're being sickened
> now, how sick would you be if something went wrong and you started seeing
> things all over /. and other sites going on about how PG crashed and
> blew away some corporation's data and half the OS away on something
> that at worse should have only caused the backend to close?

Sick enough.  But that applies to all our supported platforms, not just Win32.  
From what I've seen and heard the 'supported' Cygwin port will barf all over 
itself under high load.  So, the first thing I personally would test for a 
Win32 native port is 'how well is it performing under load?' -- after it 
passes that I would then throw the more pathological cases at it.

>  It won't
> matter that it was running on windows, it would have been a native
> port that was blessed by the PGDG.

So?  How many users out there actually know about the PGDG?  How many users 
have gotten PostgreSQL from their distributor of choice (whether a Linux 
distribution, the Cygwin distribution, FreeBSD ports, or wherever) and know 
nothing of PGDG or even postgresql.org?  We make ourselves too important.

I know enough to take all those sites with a shakerful of salt.  But then 
again I know enough to know that the batboy didn't help Clinton or Bush do 
anything, 'Weekly World News' aside.  We can't prevent the tabloid mentality 
regardless of what we do.  Or don't do.  

The point being that if any release of anything labeled 'PostgreSQL', 
regardless of its status as blessed or not blessed (or even cursed) by the 
PGDG, does what you've said, PostgreSQL as a whole will suffer.  Our blessing 
or cursing is meaningless to most users.  Or, in slightly different words, if 
they can't be bothered to care that it's on Windows then they aren't going to 
care whether we gave it the Royal Seal of PGDG either.

However, I'm sure the folks that are wanting to sell this Win32 native port 
care a whole lot about how much return business they get -- so I'm sure they 
care more about whether it is robustly tested than you give them credit.

> If anything, the resistance to this testing should sicken you.

There isn't any resistance to this testing that I've seen.  ISTM that the 
resistance is to the idea of a 'supported' WIn32 native port.  So, let's test 
the Win32 native beta using your scheme, and see what falls down.  And let's 
test Linux, *BSD, HP-UX, and AIX using the same scheme and see if it falls 
down.  Let's just be fair about the testing.  The Win32 stuff is being 
proclaimed as beta already -- so none are being misled into thinking it's 
production grade right now.  But it is passing those tests that hitherto have 
been thrown at it -- and it seems to be passing them well.
-- 
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
1 Peter 4:11