Yesterday Fedora 40 was released as GA available release.
According to the project website (download for Linux/Fedora):
" the PostgreSQL project provides a
repository of packages of all supported versions for the most common distributions."
Today (24.4.2024) I upgraded my laptop to Fedora 40, but there where no repository available, so I ended with a mix of Fedora 40 and Fedora 39 installation.
To mitigate this situation, I propose to provide these repositories much earlier in the beta phase of the distributions:
Fedora easily switches from a beta to a full installation by simply dnf upgrading after GA release. So it should be possible, to test the standard repositories and installations in the beta phase.
This also could give a broader coverage of the new standard tools utilized (e.g. gcc compiler), wich changed in the current case from major version 13 to 14.
Instead of following every beta introduction of linux distros I propose to provide the repositories with (or shortly after) the standard dates for minor releases, especially in February and August of the year, wich seems well fitting the rythm of distribution releases.
The website for download also should contain the new upcoming distributions to avoid the current 404 error during installation/upgrade.
Should any serious compiler problems arise, the publication can be delayed until they are solved.
This proposal also follows the idea of getting reproducable builds and integrating build scripts into the source tree. [1]
I think there should be not much extra work, since the same minor versions of the Postgres repositories have to be build anyway at release time of the linux distribution.
I think for easy installation it is important to have a standard installation experience for all potential users so that manual installation or self compilation can be avoided.
To complete this message I would kindly ask if somebody has taken a look on bug report # 18339 which addressed another problem with fedora installations. [2]
(CC Devrim according to the thread Security lessons from libzlma - libsystemd)
regards
Hans Buschmann
