Welcome!

Hi,

After having been talking about it for so long, a debian maintainer
*team* around PostgreSQL related efforts is forming.  <applause> :)

So, this list is about organizing our work together, and I think we
should begin with listing what we want to do.  Oh and maybe saying hello
so that the others get to discover who's on board ! :)

Here's what I have in mind, and have been talking to some of you
individually:

 - PostgreSQL packaging for debian

   My understanding is that Martin would appreciate some help there,
   mainly in order for the team to still be responsive to releases when
   that conflicts with his own personal schedule.  Which is hard to
   achieve with a team of one.

 - same, for all supported major versions

   It would also be good to maintain packaging for all supported major
   versions of PostgreSQL.  The technical details are already there, of
   course, so it's about servicing our users in a way that debian is
   unable to (because of stable policies about reaching EOL).

   It means some effort to test/validate that the current common
   packages continue supporting all supported major versions, which is
   not the current intention, even if apparently it works well enough
   for 8.3 onward.  Some specifics for supporting older releases have
   been cleaned out of the common code, IIUC.

 - extension packaging for same set of versions

   Most extensions are source-compatible with several major versions, if
   not all of them, but currently debian only offers packaging for one
   target version at a time.  There's now postgresql-server-dev-all with
   the pg_buildext script to help solve that (thanks to VPATH build).

   The goal here would be to get all compatible extensions to use this
   mechanism and easily build postgresql-X.Y-ext packages with X.Y in
   the list 8.3, 8.4, 9.0 and 9.1, currently.

   Christoph is also playing with the idea of implementing a tool based
   on the PGXN client, dh-make-pgsql-extension or something, that would
   offer the same service as dh-make-perl for CPAN.

 - http://apt.postgresql.org/

   As debian policy is not compatible with distributing all those things
   from the two previous points, another goal is to host binary packages
   for debian GNU/Linux for i386 and amd64 on the PostgreSQL
   infrastructure.  Maybe we could add some more archs here, or support
   for debian/kFreeBSD, but that is not the immediate goal.

Let's rock debian and PostgreSQL worlds together even more :)

Regards,
--
Dimitri Fontaine
http://2ndQuadrant.fr     PostgreSQL : Expertise, Formation et Support