Hi,
On 2022-09-01 22:34:07 +0200, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> 4) We include the date, excluding 0 for some mysterious reason, in the
> > version
> > number. This seems to unnecessarily contribute to making the build not
> > reproducible. Hails from long ago:
> >
> > commit 9af932075098bd3c143993386288a634d518713c
> > Author: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
> > Date: 2004-12-19 02:16:31 +0000
> >
> > Add Win32 version stamps that increment each day for proper SYSTEM32
> > DLL pginstaller installs.
> >
>
> This is obviously far too long ago for me to *actually* remember, but I
> think the idea was to make it work with snapshot installers. As they would
> only replace the binary if the version number was newer, so for snapshots
> it would be useful to have it always upgrade.
Does any installer actually behave that way? Seems very doubtful.
> 5) We have a PGFILEDESC for (nearly?) every binary/library. They largely
> > don't
> > seem more useful descriptions than the binary's name. Why don't we just
> > drop most of them and just set the description as something like
> > "PostgreSQL $name (binary|library)"? I doubt anybody ever looks into
> > these
> > details except to perhaps check the version number or such.
> >
>
> At least back in the days, a lot of software inventory programs would
> scrape this information into corporate-wide databases to keep track of what
> was in use across enterprises. I have no idea if people still do that or if
> it's all just checksums+databases now, but that was one reason back in the
> days to put it there.
Think that still happens, although I suspect they care more about the vendor
etc than about the description. And would likely care more if we signed
build products etc...
> But yes, setting the description per your suggestion would work equally
> well for that, and would make things more consistent.
I guess I'll come up with a patch then :(
Greetings,
Andres Freund
