Re: Status of 1.4

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi Philip;

Important work on 1.4 for better RPM installs have already been done but more needs to be done.

We have already removed dependencies to PostgreSQL contrib/extensions. I am pushing for a policy that contrib/extensions should only be used on LedgerSMB extensions and not by the core software.  This will allow us to have two RPM's, one of which will list postgresql-server as a dependency and the other will only list the client libraries.

Note that the above only works for PostgreSQL 8.4 or higher.  We cannot backport this to 1.3 because if we do we have to drop support for PostgreSQL 8.3.  I don't see this happening.

The above change has also resulted in significant performance gains in affected areas.

There are, however, a few other areas to address.  It isn't clear whether these can be backported to the standard branch but they will be done as well.

The first is that Config::Std really doesn't seem to be as well supported on various packages as I would like.  We need to figure out how best to approach this.  One option would be, since this is a pure Perl module, to just include it in the RPM in the local install.  Another option would be to change the config parsing to a different module.  This would probably not be a big job.

The final thing that needs to be done is that we need a tool that can try to validate installation configuration and correct if possible without going through the whole build process.  Either that or we need to make a decision that we will require the build-requires modules as well as the modules required for use.  The build-requires include Test, Test::More, and Test::Exception.  Either of these approaches could be done in the stable branch.

Any feedback on these approaches, or other things you think need to be done are worth noting, however.

Best Wishes,

Chris Travers