On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Ken Tanzer <ken.tanzer@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> On Sat, Nov 23, 2013 at 2:20 AM, Vik Fearing <vik.fearing@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Chapter 15 of our documentation handles installing from source.
>> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/installation.html
> Thanks for the link. I really do appreciate all the documentation thatFWIW, I think this is outside the scope of Chapter 15, and especially
> Postgres has put together. In this case I especially like the short
> version provided, which covers part of what I was looking for. It would be
> great if there were a similar page that addressed how to set this up
> side-by-side with an existing installation, and had a cheat sheet for
> pulling in build tools and libraries. (As in, on Cent OS run "yum install
> x y z...", Ubunutu "apt-get install a x z".) I get that the build
> environment and libraries are outside of the scope of Postgres proper and
> maybe unfair to ask it be documented, but they're still steps people have
> to go through. If they were included in that short version format, it
> would be fantastic!
outside the scope of the short version ;-). If you're not wanting to
do the /usr/local approach, you're most likely wanting to build a
replacement for some distro-supplied packaging of Postgres.
Well yes and no. In my case I'm actually running CentOs with the PGDG packages straight from you folks.
My starting point was that right now I don't have a non-production spare machine. So I need to _assure_ myself I'm not going to screw things up (time sink!). I don't keep a build environment, but don't mind installing one temporarily.
The two approaches I'd thought of were:
1) Build a new binary, stop server, move new binary into place; start server
(Not sure if this works or not!)
2) Build the whole thing, install and run side-by-side
So maybe /usr/local would work, but it seems like SRPM + patch will be the closest to matching my current setup, and do the quickest job of pulling in everything needed.
There
are too many of those, and they change too often, for us to be able
to provide reasonable instructions for that in our formal docs.
Moreover, 99% of what you need to know for that is not PG-specific but
distro-specific.
Perhaps it'd be worth setting up page(s) on our wiki about this, though?
The question certainly comes up often enough.
regards, tom lane
As a side thought, what about creating a source RPM configured to install side-by-side, and on a different port? Wouldn't that be just a few tweaks to make? And since you're maintaining packages anyway...
But if not, it would be great if the wiki page included a "to build a side-by-side RPM, these are the X things you have to change after you install the source" section, and I guess that would work for the distro-supplied RPMs as well.
Then I could boil it down to:
rpm -qa > original.packages
Download source RPM
yum-builddep source RPM
rpm -i source RPM
Apply patch(es)
Tweak side-by-side config (if not done already)
Build & install binary RPM
(possibly copy binary, or data directory)
test / run / test /run...
rpm -e $( rpm -qa | cat - original.packages | sort | uniq -u )
and maybe remove a few files or folders (listed on the wiki page of course!)
And then it's done, with little hassle and no trace left behind. Although maybe I'm missing some complexities here. And while I know it's easy to suggest work for other people, it does seem that at least documenting it would really simplify things for casual or occasional builders or testers. I can say for sure that if I'd found something like this documented I would have tested your patch. Of course in this case it wouldn't have ended up doing any good... ;)
Cheers,
Ken
AGENCY Software
A data system that puts you in control
100% Free Software
(253) 245-3801
learn more about AGENCY or
follow the discussion.
