I've just committed the changes to the PostgreSQL website announcing 8.2beta1. It'll take a short while before it replicates to all our mirrors, but the files are already available from the download site.
While hacking the website today, I've also made two other changes. First it's yet another attempt to make the new techdocs code do what it's supposed to do - by allowing code tags, and by forcibly stripping forbitten STYLE attributes that appear to sneak in now and then.
Finally, the interactive docs section now requires a community login before you can post comments. This is yet another attempt at getting rid of the insane amount of commentspam we're getting on those these days. Let's hope it works for those, but does not make it too much of a hassle for the users that want to contribute. This update will take a bit longer, because we don't update the docs section of the site as often as the rest.
Why does this always happen just before beta... (ok, there's a logical explanation from that, but it can still be a bother when it does happen)
Dave's been building the beta MSI files, and came across a nasty bug that pretty much makes the current cvs head unusable if you enable redirect_stderr to a logfile. I've submitted a patch for this, hopefully it'll be applied before we need to push beta1, and we can steal it into the installer (even though official beta1 has already been tagged from what I can see in the cvs logs).
While hacking around things here, I also fixed a couple of other minor things for pg 8.2: a warning message about job object APIs won't be logged everytime the server is started on Windows 2000. Also, pg_regress has been updated with a couple of things it couldn't do on Windows before (missed them during Toms cleanup while I was on vacation). None of this is applied, but hopefully it will go in soon.
As for the installer, with the code I just committed we no longer ship postmaster.exe, which should reduce the size of the distribution with about 3.5Mb. It should not be needed anymore, but if it does, we'll just have to put it back.
I've also ripped out the check for terminal services install on Windows 2003 - in all the tests I've run it is not a problem installing through TS on 2003. Only on 2000, where the check remains.
Finally, I've changed some build stuff so it's not hardcoded to the location of the new MSVC8 dependencies introduced by pgAdmin 1.6.
Dave, as usual, have done a lot of work updating all dependencies for 8.2 to their new versions, so we should be good to go.
Life is good, let's hope PostgreSQL 8.2 also turns out good!
I've put up the conference picture from this summers Anniversary Summit on the postgresql.org website, including an imagemap that puts name on all the faces in it. (Warning, fairly large picture, almost 5Mb. Don't load if you're on GPRS or something..)
Check it out, find out if you know someone on the picture without a name, and let me/us know what to put there!
Seems Dave has crossed the line to the insane. Beleive it or not, but he gave me commit permissions on pgAdmin3. I guess he got tired of me nagging on him for quick processing of my patches. Now wait for things to blow up completely...
So far I've done some hackery on the Query Tool, so 1.6 will have the capability to launch the query tool separate from the main pgAdmin window, making startup significantly faster if you just want a GUI query tool. It will also be possible to open a new Query Tool window from inside the current one, with no need to go back out to the main object tree and open from there.
For those not knowing, Dave has announced feature freeze on pgAdmin3 1.6 for monday so that translators can get things done in good time before the PostgreSQL 8.2 release (which will ship with pgAdmin3 1.6 on at least Win32).
(oh yeah: Thanks Dave!)
After spending the weekend doing completely unrelated things that were a lot more fun than coding PostgreSQL (what? Is that possible, you ask. Yes, it is. Really. I promise.), I've now put together a quick patch for the LDAP-breaks-everything-on-Windows-2000 issue. Very simple patch, so I think it's quite safe.
I've also noticed that the reason that there weren't any comments on my vc++ build patch is that the -patches list ate it. Twice. So nobody ever actually saw it. Oops. Reposted with a link instead today. Let's hope that list issue gets sorted quickly.
There, all caught up on the email. I think I set a new record for many-emails-in-short-time to the lists earlier today, when I did the second pass through all email I saved and actually did something about it.
Seems Tom fixed most of the issues that turned up while I was gone already, but there are a couple of fairly minor win32 issues sitting there waiting for me. I hope to get the time in to work on a couple of small patches for those over the next couple of days. Then back to finishing off the Win32 VC build thingie, which apparantly didn't draw a single comment while I was gone...
and that's PostgreSQL related only. Yes, I'm back from my vacation. If you're expecting a response from me, and you see me answering other people but not you, just be patient for a while. This will take some time...
That said, vacation was great, now back to some serious postgresqling. And I guess regular work as well.
I have posted a first "almost complete" version of the vc build system to -patches. Those interested in building pg (everything, not just the client) with Visual C++ 2005 should check it out, and let me know of any issues.
For details, see -patches. Super-quick summary: VC++ patch will allow us to properly integrate with windows debuggers, profilers and such tools. And it will take away the dependency on mingw/msys to build. Hopefully, it will also be a nice path towards Win64 support.
And for those who're worried - no, mingw support is definitly not going away.
Along with this, I've also posted an initial port of pg_regress to C, which will be required to run the regression tests without mingw/msys. Feel free to check that one out as well...
Back home in Sweden, after a fairly uneventful trip and much faster than last time (one reason would be that this trip didn't include a stopover in San Francisco). Other than a long delayed connection flight in Philadelphia (isn't it just so much fun to hang around an airport for incremental values of "now delayed another 15 minutes"?), nothing bad. Interestingly enough, most of the delay was actually caught up before we arrived in Stockholm... I guess the wind-gods were on our side today.
Anyway. Post-conference code-sprint summary. I'll start by saying this was a brilliant idea - IMO it worked out really well. However, I'm not so sure I'd call it a codesprint. I had the vision of 30 guys tapping away like madmen on their keyboards trying to flood Bruce and Tom with as many patches as possible during two days, and that's not really what happened. Instead, there were plenty of time set aside for group discussions on separate topics (replications, dtrace etc), and the most important thing was the ability to talk to people before and around the coding. Tom, Bruce and other major coders were available all the time for questions and discussions about how to do things, which really helped. Writing the actual code can be done alone - especially with the good preparation you got here.
So. Maybe not a sprint, but still a very good "team-distance-running" or something. We've seen a few patches already come in, and I'd expect more over the next couple of weeks as people finish up the final parts when they get home.
For those interested, I spent most of the code time working on some of the final touches to the Visual C++ build system (thanks to David Fetter for helping me make my perl code actually look like proper perl), and also did some first stumbling steps on porting pg_regress to C. I definitly hope to have the VC++ stuff done in time for feature freeze, unfortunatly I'm not sure I'll have the time for pg_regress.
I read somewhere that real bloggers would always blog during a conference, preferrably getting at least one post in for each talk. Well, I'm not going to do that, but hey, here's at least one.
Very good day so far. Intro by Bruce talking about how things started. The PL/pgsql debugger presented by Korry (EnterpriseDB) looks really good. Plenty of interesting lightning-talks. And right now in the longest talk of the whole conference - "Introduction to Hacking PostgreSQL Workshop" with Neil Conway and Gavin Sherry (see picture). Given that I need to actually listen to that in order to understand it, this post took a while to write, so I'm just going to focus on listening now..
(apologies for bad quality image. That's what you get for forgetting your CF reader leading to the usage of a bad cellphone camera instead.. Better ones later, hopefully.)