In trying to help an extension debian packaging effort, I’ve once again proposed to handle it. That’s because I now begin to know how to do it, as you can see in my package overview page at debian QA facility. There’s a reason why I proposed myself here, it’s that yet another tool of mine is now to be found in debian, and should greatly help extension packaging there. You can already check for the postgresql-server-dev-all package page if you’re that impatient!

Back? Ok, so I used to have two main gripes against debian support for PostgreSQL. The first one, which is now feeling alone, is that both project release support policy aren’t compatible enough for debian stable to include all currently supported stable PostgreSQL major version. That’s very bad that debian stable will only propose one major version, knowing that the support for several of them is in there.

The problem is two fold: first, debian stable has to maintain any distributed package. There’s no deprecation policy allowing for droping the ball. So the other side of this coin is that debian developers must take on themselves maintaining included software for as long as stable is not renamed oldstable. And it so happens that there’s no debian developer that feels like maintaining end of lined PostgreSQL releases without help from PostgreSQL Core Team. Or, say, without official statement that they would help.

Now, why I don’t like this situation is because I’m pretty sure there’s very few software development group offering as long and reliable maintenance policy as PostgreSQL is doing, but debian will still happily distribute unknown-maintenance-policy pieces of code in its stable repositories. So the uncertainty excuse is rather poor. And highly frustrating.

The consequence of this fact leads to my second main gripe against debian support for PostgreSQL: the extensions. It so happens that the PostgreSQL extensions are developped for supporting several major versions from the same source code. So typically, all you need to do is recompile the extension against the new major version, and there you go.

Now, say debian new stable is coming with 8.4 rather than 8.3 as it used to. You should be able to just build the extensions (like prefix), without changing the source package, nor droping postgresql-8.3-prefix from the distribution on the grounds that 8.3 ain’t in debian stable anymore.

I’ve been ranting a lot about this state of facts, and I finally provided a patch to the postgresql-common debian packaging, which made it into version 110: welcome pg_buildext. An exemple of how to use it can be found in the git branch for prefix, it shows up in debian/pgversions and debian/rules files.

As you can see, the pg_buildext tool allows you to list the PostgreSQL major versions the extension you’re packaging supports, and only those that are both in your list and in the current debian supported major version list will get built. pg_buildext will do a VPATH build of your extension, so it’s capable of building the same extension for multiple major versions of PostgreSQL. Here’s how it looks:

# build all supported version
	pg_buildext build $(SRCDIR) $(TARGET) "$(CFLAGS)"

	# then install each of them
	for v in `pg_buildext supported-versions $(SRCDIR)`; do \
		dh_install -ppostgresql-$$v-prefix ;\
	done

And the files are to be found in those places:

dim ~/dev/prefix cat debian/postgresql-8.3-prefix.install 
debian/prefix-8.3/prefix.so usr/lib/postgresql/8.3/lib
debian/prefix-8.3/prefix.sql usr/share/postgresql/8.3/contrib

dim ~/dev/prefix cat debian/postgresql-8.4-prefix.install                                                                         
debian/prefix-8.4/prefix.so usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/lib
debian/prefix-8.4/prefix.sql usr/share/postgresql/8.4/contrib

So you still need to maintain debian/pgversions and the postgresql-X.Y-extension.* files, but then a change in debian support for PostgreSQL major versions will be handled automatically (there’s a facility to trigger automatic rebuild when necessary).

All this ranting to explain that pretty soon, the extenion’s packages that I maintain will no longer have to be patched when dropping a previously supported major version of PostgreSQL. I’m breathing a little better, so thanks a lot Martin!