First 6.5 RPMs

Hi. I've posted RPMs for Postgres v6.5 at
 ftp://postgresql.org/pub/RPMS.beta/postgresql*.rpm
and ftp://postgresql.org/pub/SRPMS.beta/postgresql*.rpm

The "beta" in the directory name is for the RPM itself, not Postgres,
and once one or a few people confirm that these RPMs do the Right
Thing then I'll change the directories to be RPMS/ and SRPMS/.

I've included Tom Lane's patches for building with shared libraries
and for fixing an rtree indexing problem.

Changes from previous RPMs built by Red Hat:

1) All available interfaces are built and packaged. These include C,
C++, tcl, perl, python, ODBC, and Java.

2) The "main package" contains the basic client libraries and apps,
and *all* of the documentation. This will allow you to use a remote
server, and to read about everything, by installing one basic package.

3) The backend server is in a separate package "postgresql-server". In
previous RPMs the server was in the main package, and the clients were
in "postgresql-clients", but the clients package was required by all
of the other packages. I think the new organization behaves better for
someone who just looks at file names to figure out what they need to
do (that's just about everyone ;).

Known problems/features to solve later:

a) The perl installation should put libraries into
architecture-specific areas on the target machine. It doesn't, and the
solution probably involves packaging most of the perl source tree into
the binary rpm, then building the package on the target. This is not a
common way to use RPM.

b) The python installation is very specific to python-1.5. The path
names are hardcoded, and I'm not sure the best way to make this
transparent. Perl has a mechanism for telling you the current library
area; don't know if python has something similar.

c) Clean up the postgresql.init startup file to make it easier to see
how to set typical parameters like DB location.

To install and use the packages:

i1) If you already have Postgres installed, make sure you do a
pg_dumpall on your installation. Use something like pg_dumpall > machine.pg_dumpall
For a simple installation, I've found this to be *completely*
transparent; much easier than I've heard it was in the past. Then shut
down the old server. If you are upgrading from v6.4.2 or earlier, use
the "-z" flag with pg_dumpall.

i2) Remove any old Postgres RPMs using rpm -e <packagename>
postgresql-clients is no longer part of the distro, so that is listed
as a "conflict" and you can't just upgrade without removing it first.

i3) Install the new RPMs. Use rpm -Uvh <packagenames>

i4) The default location for the data area is /var/lib/pgsql/data/.
Make sure this is cleaned up or moved aside by renaming it so that you
can initialize a new database area.

i5) Run initdb. Point to your new database area with something like  initdb --pgdata=/var/lib/pgsql

i6) Start up your new server.

i7) Reload your database. Use something like psql < machine.pg_dumpall

i8) Let me know what went wrong ;)

Please let me know how it goes, so we can nail the RPM building
process for this release. Oh, I built this using a RH5.2 machine, so
someone running RH6.0 might want to verify that this installs and
works there too. afaik it should be OK, unless the python version
number has bumped.
                       - Thomas

-- 
Thomas Lockhart                lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu
South Pasadena, California