[postgis-devel] PSC Vote: Get rid of micro in PostGIS Extension scripts (and comments from others)

[Regina Obe]

> On Mon, Jun 06, 2022 at 10:38:18AM -0400, Regina Obe wrote:
> > But you are okay with 0 byte files as Paul proposed right?  That wouldn t
> change functionality.  Just changing symlink to 0 byte.
> > I don t know about any other systems or how people package but packaging
> symlinks doesn t work well on windows.
> 
> Could the 0-bytes idea be described more clearly ?
> I did not understand it.
> Current situation is that PostGIS-3.3.0 installs a upgrade script:
> 
>   postgis--ANY--3.3.0.sql
> 
> And a symlink (on UNIX derived systems) or copies (on systems NOT
> supporting symlinks) for each supported version, in the form:
> 
>   postgis--${older}--ANY.sql -> postgis--ANY--3.3.0.sql
> 
[Regina Obe] 
I do not see any files being installed with postgis--${older}--ANY.sql format.

I thought switching things to ANY was something you did by updating the system catalogs, which is a no no on many DbaaS.

> What would the 0-bytes layout be ?
[Regina Obe] 
I thought I had described it well enough here:
https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/wiki/PostGISExtensionPaths#SOLUTION3

What was unclear about that?  I think you said Paul had intended MAX so the X we might change to MAX to be clearer in intention.

To be clear about my current frustration.  100MB is the compressed size.  When someone extracts, it is a little under 1GB.   So for me to ship 4 versions of PostGIS 3.3.0 (PostgreSQL 11-15)  - I need 4GB of disk space  + (100*4*2 -- so another 1G this is for the zips with PostGIS alone, and the Installer, and the zip with PostGIS with other extensions).  = so total of 5G  (and 5G for each micro after)

> > For PostGIS 3.3.0 my package size doubled because we now have the
> spatial_ref_sys.sql files included in every micro.
> 
> I was hoping to get 3.3.0 out with NO spatial_ref_sys at all, using the fetch-
> from-proj thing.
[Regina Obe] 
That isn't going to happen in 3.3.0.  Maybe in 3.4.0.  We would first need to require Proj 6+ for PostGIS 3.3.0 which we hit a stale-mate on:

As I recall (Darafei, You, me) +1 ,  Paul (but there are people out there who might be using proj < 6  (no decision) ) - stale mate

And we've also released an alpha, so we shouldn't be upping requirements after an alpha has been released.

I'm fine with a 0-byte, or we just take out that spatial ref sys fix in 3.3 and properly fix in 3.4, where we can more safely require proj 6+

> 
> > So I guess size is more important to me now as it is causing me to run out of
> disk space faster.
> 
> Is Windows the only system affected by this lack of symlinks ?
> Does it support any other form of links ? (UNIX for example also supports
> hard-links)
> 
> --strk;
It supports symbolic links

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/creating-symbolic-links

But not sure how to create them programmatically and not sure what other kinds of issues I would be trading in that I can't debug.  My understanding is the symbolic links aren't always correctly recognized by programs, and for most uses hard links (junctions) are used instead. But with junctions you can't as easily distinguish them from the real thing, and I think they also can't be relative.

If we don't go with the 0-byte idea, then I can code around for windows to use 0-bytes. 
Just let me know if you are all against that idea.  I can throw up another vote just for that if you want. 

Thanks,
Regina