On Wednesday 25 January 2006 18:40, Benjamin Smith wrote: > If you don't mind me asking, what's the effective difference between the > fedora packages, and the ones officially distributed at postgresql.org? I'll field this one. Sorry for the Off Topic content to those who might not find this interesting; I'll try to keep it short (which means skipping lots of juicy details about the GreatBridge event, backporting to really old distributions, and the SuSE difference). Technical differences are easy to locate; look at the spec files, the initscript, and the patchsets. The cultural reasons for the technical differences are to me more interesting, and I am somewhat uniquely qualified to comment on them, since I maintained the RPM set for five years between 1999 and 2004, beginning at Red Hat 6.2/PG 6.5 (and working with Jeff, Cristian, Elliot, Trond, and other Red Hat staff) and ending just before the release of PG 8.0. While the PostgreSQL RPM Foundry project (located at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgsqlrpms/ ) aims to build Fedora/Red Hat RPMs, the 'Official' Red Hat Packager is Tom Lane, who is a member of the PostgreSQL Steering Committee (aka 'Core'), and a Red Hat employee (he is responsible for the RHEL PostgreSQL and MySQL packages, as well as backporting bugfixes to the older versions still under RHEL support; these backports get released from the PostgreSQL official site, too). Tom is also a member of the psqlrpms PGFoundry project group and has quite a bit of input into both sets of packages. Devrim Gunduz, who works for one of the several commercial PostgreSQL companies, CommandPrompt, is the current PostgreSQL Global Development Group RPM coordinator. The PGFoundry and Tom Lane's packages do differ; the PGFoundry versions are designed to be more generic, and are designed to work with earlier Red Hat/Fedora releases. The current Fedora and RHEL packages have no such backwards-compatibility aspirations. There are a number of other top-notch projects at PGFoundry you might find interesting, as well. If anyone would like more detail, I'll be happy to oblige in off-list e-mail. -- Lamar Owen Director of Information Technology Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute 1 PARI Drive Rosman, NC 28772 (828)862-5554 www.pari.edu