[postgis-devel] Moving towards a 1.2.2 release?

[Stephen Frost]

* Paul Ramsey (pramsey at refractions.net) wrote:
> We need a "template_postgis" routine in the distribution because we  
> are going to start recommending that one be created by any packaged  
> version of PostGIS. This will allow client software without access to  
> the server to create "spatialized" database with a CREATE DATABASE  
> sql command, instead of needing to know the location of the magic  
> lwpostgis.so on the server side.

Erm, that doesn't make sense.  Distributions put the lwpostgis.so into a
specific place, and at least on Debian that's the PG lib directory which
means you don't need to know the path to it at all.  In either case
though, the problem of knowing where the lwpostgis.so exists has already
been solved by the packaging system, it's not like it moves it around,
nor does it take alot of magic to figure out what that place is.
Distributions that don't put it into the PG lib directory (and I don't
know if there are any such) are pretty silly and could stand to have
that fixed *anyway*, imv.

If that's the only reason for a 'template_postgis' then it should be
removed entirely.  My original assumption was that it was there to make
it easier for admins, which can be a worthwhile goal, not to try to
solve some non-problem.

Regardless, however, I've got no intention (and, indeed, would be
strongly against) of creating a database of *any* kind during package
installation under Debian.  There's alot of broken cases where it won't
work, so you can't assume it'll be there in the end, and in general I
don't feel it's something which is appropriate for a package like
PostGIS to *do* anyway.  Make it easy for an admin to create a
template_gis, fine, but don't recommend distributions automatically do
it on installation.

> That said, the current thing in the distribution does seem a terrible  
> mess and very debian-specific.

Indeed.  My concern is more with the 'terrible mess' than the
'debian-specific' piece of it, of course. ;)

	Stephen

> On 1-Jun-07, at 6:58 AM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> 
> >* Mark Cave-Ayland (mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk) wrote:
> >>AFAICT the following issues remain before we can release 1.2.2:
> >>
> >>1. template_gis - the whole thing needs to be revisited...
> >
> >Agreed, 100%.  I don't really see why anything for template_gis  
> >needs to
> >be or should be done during build but even beyond that it didn't  
> >appear
> >to be respecting $DESTDIR properly for some reason.  For those  
> >reasons I
> >removed it from the build for the Debian PostGIS 1.2.1 packages.  I'm
> >also not at all convinced it should even be a part of the main PostGIS
> >distribution...
> >
> >Also, the 'extras/debian' directory should be removed, it's horribly
> >outdated, wrong and obsolete.
> >
> >	Thanks!
> >
> >		Stephen
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