Re: pgadmin-for-web is going nowhere - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

From Dave Page
Subject Re: pgadmin-for-web is going nowhere
Date
Msg-id CA+OCxoypwnCKeksMK9qznvH=Yb6-sDDWGX64VmnTbeaL_QBC9g@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: pgadmin-for-web is going nowhere  (Josh Berkus <josh@berkus.org>)
List pgadmin-hackers


On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 7:17 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@berkus.org> wrote:
On 07/14/2017 01:01 AM, Dave Page wrote:

> Setting up in server mode by following those docs takes just a few minutes.
>
>
>     Six months ago, I jumped on this with the goal of solving it, partly
>     through use of linux containers.  However, I'm full stop because of the
>     emphasis on (a) having only one package which is both desktop and web,
>     and (b) treating the web version as the ugly stepchild.
>
>
> It's not an ugly step-child - it's a non-default configuration because
> the majority of users use desktop mode. There's a big difference.

Er, no, there's not.  That's *exactly* what I mean by "ugly-step-child".
 The current project attitude is "we test desktop mode, and if web mode
works, well, that's a happy accident."

Except, that's not the case. The regression tests run through a browser, not the desktop runtime, and like Rob's team at Pivotal, my team mostly works through the browser as well as it's far easier to debug that way.

Web mode is also the only supported mode of operation for Postgres Enterprise Manager which is based on pgAdmin 4, so it gets a ton of testing as part of that as well.

So no, it's not an "ugly stepchild", it gets more testing and use than desktop mode. It's just not the default.
 

I'm not going to recommend pgadmin-for-web to anyone under those
circumstances.  And *of course* the majority of users use desktop mode,
given that web mode doesn't work out of the box, and sometimes doesn't
work at all.

>     As such, I'm done.  When y'all decide to get real with caring about
>     users' ability to install pgadmin for web, ping me.
>
>
> Oh, we care. That's why it's well documented and takes just a few easy
> steps - and why for some time now I've been wracking my brain about ways
> to make it even easier.

Here's how to make it easier: don't require steps.  Really.  If someone
installs pgadmin-for-web using RPMs or Debs, it should Just Work.  The
changes in the tickets I filed will make that happen for the RPMs,
except that you rejected them as WONTFIX.

The changes you proposed would break the desktop mode, which is what most people use. Why do you consider your use case more important to work out of the box than the more common use case? Or are you ignoring the reasons why your suggested changes were rejected?
 

Part of the problem there is that the pgadmin-for-web RPM spec really
needs to be completely separate from pgadmin-for-desktop.

You are misunderstanding what the RPM is for. It's not "pgadmin-for-web", it's "pgadmin-web-components".
 

> There are a bunch of pgAdmin containers on
> Docker Hub available, few, if any of which were setup with the help of
> our mailing lists, so it's presumably not that hard to do. Either that
> or the Docker guys have thicker skins than the Project Atomic guys :-)

That's because docker hub is the "wild west" where people are willing to
hack whatever toghether whether or not it's maintainable or updated. For
the Fedora & CentOS projects, there's requirements that builds have to
be 100% reproduceable, which most of the time means RPMs.  My goal was
to make pgadmin-for-web available officially on Fedora & CentOS, and
that's what I'm giving up on.

So what do you require? Install RPMs and run, with zero additional config? That seems to be what you are asking for, but I don't see that it would ever be possible because at the very least you'll need to do "systemctl enable httpd". 

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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