[Pljava-dev] Working on 1.4 beta release

[Thomas Hallgren]

Tom Dunstan wrote:
> Uh, if not us, then who? PL/Java is really cool technology that is
> something of a pain to get to the point where you can actually use it
> (esp on win32). Let's not compare with the built-in PLs. And yet I
> really don't think there's anything that really *requires* it being so
> fiddly.
>
> I would really like to see, ideally, PL/Java installable by
> yum/apt-get/pkg-get etc on unix-like systems. I think there's a bit of
> work to do to get there, but it's not impossible. But I'll leave
> discussion on that for another thread.
>
>   
Tom, don't get me wrong. I'm of course all for this. I'm just afraid 
that the burden of creating a new release will become so heavy that it 
will have a negative impact on the number of releases that will come out.

>
> ...
> I'm pretty sure I was able to compile pljava against a 1.5 JDK and run
> it against a 1.6 one. So I don't think we should need to build it for
> more than one JVM.
That's assuming that we don't want to support GCJ. That's equal to 
adding a requirement to install a JVM.

> The architectures that Kris mentioned sound good to
> me, although I'd like to see Solaris/sparc in there as well if
> possible (although like Kris, I don't have access to a sparc machine
> atm), and perhaps MacOSX/x86 (since I've got a Macbook :) ). The
> question then becomes: which pgsql versions do we want to support?
> 8.1-8.3?
>
>   
Perhaps an idea would be to provide binary support for the latest, or 
the latest two? I.e. if you want older, build your own?

> I have a build script that can build pljava, run the test suite and
> spit out binaries. It works (well I've tested it) on win32,
> solaris/x86 and linux/x86. I'd be more than happy to build binaries
> for all of those postgres versions for those platforms.
>
>   
Great! Would you like to be added to the project so that you can upload 
files there?

> Build java code with -g, but pljava c code without debugging symbols I
> reckon. If someone wants to debug pljava C code, they can build it
> themselves. :)
>
>   
Well, it's not so much about debugging really. It's more the information 
you can get once something is crashing. As I mentioned, the JVM prints a 
stack trace that can be very useful. Much is gained if the user who 
experiences a crash can provide the JVM dump file in a bug-report or 
attach it to a mailing list posting.

>
> I have some free time over the next few weeks, so I can have a go at
> getting the wiki docs into some kind of source control.
Awesome.

> What source format do we want? HTML? Docbook a la the main distribution? HTML
> would obviously require less effort at build time, so I would probably
> vote for it just on those grounds...
>
>   
+1 for html.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren