On Wednesday 25 January 2006 18:40, Benjamin Smith wrote:
> If you don't mind me asking, what's the effective difference between the
> fedora packages, and the ones officially distributed at postgresql.org?
I'll field this one. Sorry for the Off Topic content to those who might not
find this interesting; I'll try to keep it short (which means skipping lots
of juicy details about the GreatBridge event, backporting to really old
distributions, and the SuSE difference).
Technical differences are easy to locate; look at the spec files, the
initscript, and the patchsets. The cultural reasons for the technical
differences are to me more interesting, and I am somewhat uniquely qualified
to comment on them, since I maintained the RPM set for five years between
1999 and 2004, beginning at Red Hat 6.2/PG 6.5 (and working with Jeff,
Cristian, Elliot, Trond, and other Red Hat staff) and ending just before the
release of PG 8.0.
While the PostgreSQL RPM Foundry project (located at
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgsqlrpms/ ) aims to build Fedora/Red Hat RPMs,
the 'Official' Red Hat Packager is Tom Lane, who is a member of the
PostgreSQL Steering Committee (aka 'Core'), and a Red Hat employee (he is
responsible for the RHEL PostgreSQL and MySQL packages, as well as
backporting bugfixes to the older versions still under RHEL support; these
backports get released from the PostgreSQL official site, too). Tom is also
a member of the psqlrpms PGFoundry project group and has quite a bit of input
into both sets of packages. Devrim Gunduz, who works for one of the several
commercial PostgreSQL companies, CommandPrompt, is the current PostgreSQL
Global Development Group RPM coordinator.
The PGFoundry and Tom Lane's packages do differ; the PGFoundry versions are
designed to be more generic, and are designed to work with earlier Red
Hat/Fedora releases. The current Fedora and RHEL packages have no such
backwards-compatibility aspirations.
There are a number of other top-notch projects at PGFoundry you might find
interesting, as well.
If anyone would like more detail, I'll be happy to oblige in off-list e-mail.
--
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu
