Re: Switching to Homebrew as recommended Mac install? - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Apr 1, 2012, at 21:50, Jay Levitt <jay.levitt@gmail.com> wrote:

> Tom Lane wrote:
>> While you might not like the EDB installer, at least those
>> folks are active in the lists and accountable for whatever problems
>> their code has.  Who in heck is responsible for the "homebrew"
>> packaging, and do they answer questions in the PG lists?

>
> Just for general knowledge... Who's responsible is whoever wants to be; homebrew is open source, and with a
github-basedworkflow, it's trivial for them to accept pull requests.  On the 1967 formulas (packages) in the repo,
therehave been 1759 contributors.  I was volunteering to be the maintainer and liaison if we did this; I'm pretty good
atemail and IRC. 
>
> It's actually pretty clever and elegant - homebrew itself uses git and github for formula updates and distribution,
andis written in ruby1.8 which ships with all Macs. /usr/local is a git repo, "brew update" is mostly "git pull", and
"brewsearch" checks for new pull requests if it doesn't find a matching formula. The whole thing's all of 1500 lines of
code,and you saw what formulas look like. 
>
> Jay
>
>

You seem highly approving of "homebrew" and seem willing to develop and support it.  I guess the question to be asked
iswhat requirements you would expect to have to meet before the Mac Downloads section would list your installer routine
alongwith the three already present?  Aside from that unless you are really intent on trying to prove yourself to be
thebest if you are trying to overcome shortcomings of the existing installers it would still be nice to let them know
howyou feel things could be improved for the community/user sub-set you belong to.   

As a Windows developer (though production is on Linux) I get where you are coming from with respect to user permissions
andthe like - what is desirable in a development and in production do differ and so having different installation
routinesfor them makes some sense.  Until your developers go to install on the production server and do not realize
thatthey should be doing something different in order to make the server more secure than their development
environment.

From what I follow I think you have really good ideas and sound reasoning.  You do not need permission to contribute to
thecommunity in the way you seek so what is it that you are really asking for?  From the sound of things your primary
focusis not in supporting the PostgreSQL community via providing services to others or developing new tools.  When brew
isreplaced by something more popular do you think you will continue to maintain the recipie or is it going to end up
stuckshowing us how to install version 9.3 or earlier.  I'm beyond my element here but the current installer
maintainersare doing so in addition to their other, more regular, contributions.  That said, the contribution, even if
itdid stall in the future, would still be welcomed and if it is found to be very useful someone would likely pickup the
torchas long as it is released under the same terms as PostgreSQL itself. 

Just trying to bridge an apparent gap since the original e-mail seems to have come across as too adversarial that the
underlyingthoughts have been overlooked.  Trying to contribute in my own way with my current resources. 

David J.