PostgreSQL in Debian Hackathon

Christoph Berg

Almost a year has passed since my talk at pgconf.eu 2011 in Amsterdam on Connecting the Debian and PostgreSQL worlds, and unfortunately little has happened on that front, mostly due to my limited spare time between family and job. pgapt.debian.net is up and running, but got few updates and is lagging behind on PostgreSQL releases.

Luckily, we got the project moving. Dimitri Fontaine and Magnus Hagander suggested to do a face-to-face meeting, so we got together at my house for two days last week and discussed ideas, repository layouts, build scripts, and whatnot to get all of us aligned for pushing the project ahead. My employer sponsored my time off work for that. We almost finished moving the repository to postgresql.org infrastructure, barring some questions of how to hook the repository into the existing mirror infrastructure; this should get resolved this week.

The build server running Jenkins is still located on my laptop, but moving this to a proper host will also happen really soon now. We are using Mika Prokop’s jenkins-debian-glue scripts for driving the package build from Jenkins. The big plus point about Jenkins is that it makes executing jobs on different distributions and architectures in parallel much easier than a bunch of homemade shell scripts could get us with reasonable effort.

Here’s a list of random points we discussed:

  • We decided to go for “pgdg” in version numbers and distribution names, i.e. packages will have version numbers like 9.1.5-1.pgdg+1, with distributions wheezy-pgdg, squeeze-pgdg, and so on.
  • There will be Debian-testing-style distributions called like wheezy-pgdg-testing that packages go into for some time before they get promoted to the “live” distributions.
  • PostgreSQL versions out of support (8.2 and below) will not be removed from the repository, but will be moved to distributions called like wheezy-pgdg-deprecated. People will still be able to use them, but the naming should make it clear that they should really be upgrading.
  • We have a slightly modified (compared to Debian unstable) postgresql-common package that sets the “supported-versions” to all versions supported by the PostgreSQL project. That will make the postgresql-server-dev-all package pull in build-dependencies for all server versions, and make extension module packages compile for all of them automatically. (Provided they are using pg_buildext.)
  • There’s no Ubuntu support in there yet, but that’s mostly only a matter of adding more cowbuilder chroots to the build jobs. TBD soon.

We really aim at using unmodified packages from Debian as much as possible, and in fact this project doesn’t mean to replace Debian’s PostgreSQL packaging work, but to extend it beyond the number of server versions (and Debian and Ubuntu versions covered) supported. The people behind the Debian and Ubuntu packages, and this repository are mostly the same, so we will claim that “our” packages will be the same quality as the “original” ones. Big thanks go to Martin Pitt for maintaining the postgresql-common testsuite that really covers every aspect of running PostgreSQL servers on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Stay tuned for updates! :)