I've been working on skytools3 packaging lately. I've been pushing quite a
lot of work into it, in order to have exactly what I needed out of the box,
after some 3 years of production and experiences with the products. Plural,
yes, because even if pgbouncer and plproxy are siblings to the projets (same
developers team, separate life cycle and releases), then skytools still
includes several sub-projects.
Here's what the skytools3 packaging is going to look like:
skytools3 Skytool's replication and queuing python-pgq3 Skytool's PGQ python library python-skytools3 python scripts framework for skytools skytools-ticker3 PGQ ticker daemon service skytools-walmgr3 high-availability archive and restore commands postgresql-8.4-pgq3 PGQ server-side code (C module for PostgreSQL) postgresql-9.0-pgq3 PGQ server-side code (C module for PostgreSQL)
This split is needed so that you can install your daemons (we call them
consumers) on separate machines than where you run PostgreSQL. But for the
walmgr part, it makes no sense to install it if you don't have a local
PostgreSQL service, as it's providing archive and restore commands. Then
the ticker, you're free to run it on any machine really, so just package it
this way (in skytools3 the ticker is written in C and does not depend on the
python framework any more).
What you can't see here yet is the new goodies that wraps it as a quality
debian package. A new skytools user is created for you when you install the
skytools3 package (which contains the services), along with a skeleton file
/etc/skytools.ini and a user directory /etc/skytools/. Put in there your
services configuration file, and register those service in the
/etc/skytools.ini file itself. Then they will get cared about in the init
sequence at startup and shutdown of your server.
The services will run under the skytools system user, and will default to
put their log into /var/log/skytools/. The pidfile will get into
/var/run/skytools/. All integrated, automated.
Next big TODO is about documentation, reviewing it and polishing it, and I
think that skytools3 will then get ready for public release. Yes, you read
it right, it's happening this very year! I'm very excited about it, and
have several architectures that will greatly benefit from the switch to
skytools3. More on that later, though! (Yes, my to blog later list is
getting quite long now).