Обсуждение: pgadmin-for-web is going nowhere

Folks,

Installing pgadmin-for-web is painful, poorly documented, and broken.
As a result, it's not considered a real UI by anyone not on this team.

Six months ago, I jumped on this with the goal of solving it, partly
through use of linux containers.  However, I'm full stop because of the
emphasis on (a) having only one package which is both desktop and web,
and (b) treating the web version as the ugly stepchild.

See: https://redmine.postgresql.org/issues/2495#change-7635

If you read the conversation on pgsql-advocacy, for example, you'll see
that even people in our own community regard pgAdmin4 as not production
quality software.

As such, I'm done.  When y'all decide to get real with caring about
users' ability to install pgadmin for web, ping me.

--Josh Berkus

Hi,

On Fri, 2017-07-14 at 09:01 +0100, Dave Page wrote:

> Right - your suggestion there was reverted because it became quickly clear
> that it broke the default desktop mode.

What if I invent an optional "pgadmin4-v1-web-setup" (or whatever) package,
that does what Josh suggested?

Regards,
--
Devrim Gündüz
EnterpriseDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
PostgreSQL Danışmanı/Consultant, Red Hat Certified Engineer
Twitter: @DevrimGunduz , @DevrimGunduzTR

On 07/14/2017 01:01 AM, Dave Page wrote:

> Setting up in server mode by following those docs takes just a few minutes.
> 
> 
>     Six months ago, I jumped on this with the goal of solving it, partly
>     through use of linux containers.  However, I'm full stop because of the
>     emphasis on (a) having only one package which is both desktop and web,
>     and (b) treating the web version as the ugly stepchild.
> 
> 
> It's not an ugly step-child - it's a non-default configuration because
> the majority of users use desktop mode. There's a big difference.

Er, no, there's not.  That's *exactly* what I mean by "ugly-step-child".The current project attitude is "we test
desktopmode, and if web mode
 
works, well, that's a happy accident."

I'm not going to recommend pgadmin-for-web to anyone under those
circumstances.  And *of course* the majority of users use desktop mode,
given that web mode doesn't work out of the box, and sometimes doesn't
work at all.

>     As such, I'm done.  When y'all decide to get real with caring about
>     users' ability to install pgadmin for web, ping me.
> 
> 
> Oh, we care. That's why it's well documented and takes just a few easy
> steps - and why for some time now I've been wracking my brain about ways
> to make it even easier. 

Here's how to make it easier: don't require steps.  Really.  If someone
installs pgadmin-for-web using RPMs or Debs, it should Just Work.  The
changes in the tickets I filed will make that happen for the RPMs,
except that you rejected them as WONTFIX.

Part of the problem there is that the pgadmin-for-web RPM spec really
needs to be completely separate from pgadmin-for-desktop.

> There are a bunch of pgAdmin containers on
> Docker Hub available, few, if any of which were setup with the help of
> our mailing lists, so it's presumably not that hard to do. Either that
> or the Docker guys have thicker skins than the Project Atomic guys :-)

That's because docker hub is the "wild west" where people are willing to
hack whatever toghether whether or not it's maintainable or updated. For
the Fedora & CentOS projects, there's requirements that builds have to
be 100% reproduceable, which most of the time means RPMs.  My goal was
to make pgadmin-for-web available officially on Fedora & CentOS, and
that's what I'm giving up on.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Containers & Databases Oh My!

On 07/14/2017 08:04 AM, Robert Eckhardt wrote:
> Josh, 
> 
> I'd be interested in knowing what specific things could be done to make
> you think that the Web version is no longer the 'ugly stepchild'. 
> 
> If I consider our (Pivotal's) current development process then the most
> honest thing we could say is that the desktop application is our
> afterthought. All of our development is done in the browser, our
> acceptance environment is an application pushed into a garden container
> hosted in the cloud. 
> 
> Admittedly, we haven't focused on the installation experience so if you
> could explain why it is so painful we could look at merging some of the
> things we are doing for acceptance into the application itself for
> distribution. 

Well, the immediate issues are addressed in two tickets:

https://redmine.postgresql.org/issues/2496

https://redmine.postgresql.org/issues/2495

The summary of these is that, out of the box, the existing RPMs install
200MB of extra software and don't result in a working install.

There is another, major issue I didn't attempt to address, which is
offering a less-heavyweight webserver option than Apache HTTPD, mainly
for container-based deployment.  I don't have a strong candidate for
this which is well-maintained upstream, though, because of the
single-process requirement.  There's a bunch of simple-python
appservers, but none of them are well-packaged and maintained.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Containers & Databases Oh My!

On 07/14/2017 11:35 AM, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> I don't know how simple you consider uwsgi, but it's certainly well
> packaged and maintained in my experience. Now granted that experience is
> mostly on debian based platform so it might differ on redhat families,
> but it seems likely. 

I remember looking into uwsgi (first choice) and there was some reason
it didn't work for this.  Maybe it was just that Grant didn't recommend
it for this.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Containers & Databases Oh My!