[postgis-devel] Getting PostGIS 3.0alpha1 super early

[Raúl Marín Rodríguez]

Hi,

As a developer it's a pain when I try to upgrade a dev cluster and every
database has a different Postgis version even though they have exactly
the same SQL code, e.g. `2.5.1dev--3.0.0dev`, `2.5.1dev--3.0.0alpha1`,
`2.5.1dev--3.0.0alpha1dev`. Having unnecessary releases doesn't help.

> Absolutely no guarantees, no support for upgrade path, for the brave
> who want it but can't install software without a version.

I'm not sure what's the issue that you are trying to solve with this.

If they don't need any guarantees or upgrade support they can use the
standard autotools (./autogen.sh && ./configure && make install) and
break their system as much as they want.

On the other hand, if the issue  is that they want distribution packages
adapted to their needs, I don't like solving it by pushing an extra load to
package maintainers by creating a premature tag [1]; specially considering
we might end up modifying the build structure several times before the first
release candidate.
There are other alternatives that people can use, like managing an unofficial
Launchpad package or using a PKGBUILD[2], that don't involve nagging
maintainers.

[1] Reminds me how much I dislike how svn handles tags, or svn itself ;D
[2] https://github.com/Algunenano/PKGBUILDs/blob/master/postgis-git/PKGBUILD