On Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 11:22 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
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.
I think the one we had back in the days was. But that one is *long* dead now.
> 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...
Yeah, agreed on both accounts.
And getting into signing them would certainly be a good thing, but that's a much bigger thing...
