Re: Time to work on Press Release 8.0 - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing when pgman@candle.pha.pa.us (Bruce Momjian) wrote:
> But many feel Slony is far better than previous solutions and should
> be touted as we have touted other replication solutions in the past.

And note that if functionality such as PL/perlNG, PL/Java is to be
mentioned, as "fairly important stuff" that is being managed outside
of $SOURCES/contrib, for there to be mention a "new, improved
replication system" ISN'T way out there.

A good presentation is NOT going to dwell on any of these things, but
in view of there being conspicuous interest in this, I don't think it
destroys a press release to _mention_ it.

Let me point out, for a moment, the discussion that resulted from
presenting the 8.0 beta announcement to Linux Weekly News.
<http://lwn.net/Articles/97213/> Almost all of the discussion was
exclusively about the _lack_ of mention of replication in that
announcement.

If the 'ultimate' press release _does_ make mention, preferably brief,
of some of the significant add-ons that are emerging on PGFoundry that
are _clearly_ of "market interest," that'll go a long way towards
defusing this sort of thing.

Perhaps the flames should get deferred until someone proposes an
actual wording for the point in question?  I'd suggest, as a starting
point, something similar to...

==================================================================

  A number of development projects outside the direct scope of the
  database project have also been flourishing:

  - PL/PerlNG, supported by Command Prompt, will allow Perl to be used
    as a fully-featured server side language to implement things like
    triggers and composite types.

  - PL/Java promises to allow Java to similarly be used for server
    programming within the database engine.

  - Slony-I, supported by Afilias, is a "master to multiple slave"
    replication system supporting cascading updates and slave
    promotion, compatible with multiple PostgreSQL versions.

  There is also an ongoing effort to simplify the ability to build
  software that has usually expected to access a PostgreSQL source
  tree, drawing the dependancies into a compiled copy of PostgreSQL.
  This will ease the task of building packages (such as RPMs) for
  extensions such as server programming languages, and should diminish
  the pressure for the PostgreSQL project to need to include such
  extensions.

==================================================================

Note, that's a sort of "really-early-would-be-draft" of item P4,
worthy only for being "red-marked" to fix/improve it.

That should not be considered final, nor should it be considered to be
the entirety of the release.  The release would also include items
P1-P3, P5-P6, several of which should be longer than P4, as well as
the list of "major enterprise enhancements."
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