Stefan,
> I heavily disagree - while there are certainly improvements to be made I
> don't think what we have is a "major step backwards" - we now have stuff
> we did not have before, like a much larger selection of packages for a
> much larger number of distributions and like with every project we ever
> did we will have to do incremental improvements.
From the perspective of someone using Martin's PPA, it is a major step
backwards. The PPA had all of the packages I was interested in, and
took 5% of the time to install per system as the new procedure does.
It may not be a step backwards for pure Debian, or for users on old/odd
Ubuntu versions, but it *certainly* is for current Ubuntu.
> Comparing for example the current apt.postgresql.org instructions to
> what we have for the rpm package we are imho on parity (like people
> complain about it being hard to figure out what their current OS is -
> you need to know that for rpms as well and afaik there has been no
> complaints about that).
You clearly haven't tried to follow both procedures from scratch, let
alone tried to teach them to anyone else.
I'm being reminded of when I first joined OpenSolaris at Sun, and I
complained that booting the system for the first time required editing
several files using vi, with no alternate editor available, even vim.
One of the Solaris engineers said "if you don't want to learn vi, you
have no business running Solaris". That sort of attitude is one of the
major reasons Opensolaris never succeeded in expanding the market for
Solaris.
I will point out that some developers run Ubuntu and Debian on their
desktops. These folks are not Sysadmins. Requiring them to have the
knowledge to edit cryptic packaging files correctly, and look up the
stupid Debian "codename", just means that they will not use a current
version of PostgreSQL, and thus will be ignorant of our new features.
Some of these developers will turn to Redis and Mongo instead, because
those databases each have a 30-second installation procedure which
requires no systems knowledge.
We already got our clock cleaned by MySQL once upon a time because
"PostgreSQL is too hard to install". Let's not do it again.
--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com
