Just a Theory

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Posts about PpFoundry

Quest for PostgreSQL Project Hosting

The pgTAP project is currently hosted by pgFoundry. This is an old version of GForge, and from what I understand, highly modified for the PostgreSQL project. That’s fine, except that it apparently makes it impossible for anyone to find the tuits to upgrade it to newer versions.

And it needs upgrading. One annoying thing I noticed is that the URLs for release files include an integer in them. For example, the URL to download pgTAP 0.23 is http://pgfoundry.org/frs/download.php/2511/pgtap-0.23.tar.bz2. See the “25111” there? It appears to be a primary key value or something, but is completely irrelevant for a release URL. I would much prefer that the URL be something like http://pgfoundry.org/frs/download.php/pgtap-0.23.tar.bz2 or, even better, http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtap/frs/pgtap-0.23.tar.bz2. But such is not the case now.

Another issue is hosting. I’ve registered pgtap.org to use for hosting the pgTAP Web site, but there is no support for pointing a hostname at a pgFoundry/GForge site.

These issues could of course be worked out if someone had the tuits to take them on, but apparently there is no one. So I’m looking to move.

The question is, where to? I could get a paid GitHub account (the pgTAP source is already on GitHub) and be able to have a pgTAP site on pgtap.org from there, so that’s a plus. And I can do file releases, too, in which case the URL format would be something like http://cloud.github.com/downloads/theory/pgtap/pgtap-0.23.tar.bz2, which isn’t ideal, but is a hell of a lot better than a URL with a sequence number in it. I could put them on the hosted site, too, in which case they’d have whatever URL I wanted them to have.

There are only two downsides I can think of to moving to GitHub:

  1. No mail list support. The pgTAP mail list has next to no traffic so far, so I’m not sure this is a big deal. I could also set up a list elsewhere, like Librelist, if I really needed one. I’d prefer to have @pgtap.org mail lists, but it’s not a big deal.

  2. I would lose whatever community presence I gain from hosting on pgFoundry. I know that when I release a Perl module to CPAN that it will be visible to lots of people in the Perl community, and automatically searchable via search.cpan.org and other tools. A CPAN release is a release to the Perl community.

    There is nothing like this for PostgreSQL. pgFoundry is the closest thing, and, frankly, nowhere near as good (pgFoundry’s search rankings have always stunk). So if I were to remove my projects from pgFoundry, how could I make them visible to the community? Is there any other central repository of or searchable list of third-party PostgreSQL offerings?

So I’m looking for advice. Does having an email list matter? If I can get pgTAP announcements included in the PostgreSQL Weekly News, is that enough community visibility? Do you know of a nice project hosting site that offers hosting, mail lists, download mirroring and custom domain handling?

I’ll follow up with a summary of what I’ve found in a later post.

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pgTAP 0.10 Released, Web Site Launched

Two major announcements this week with regard to pgTAP:

First, I’ve release pgTAP 0.10. The two major categories of changes are compatibility as far back as PostgreSQL 8.0 and new functions for testing database schemas. Here’s a quick example:

BEGIN;
SELECT plan(7);

SELECT has_table( 'users' );
SELECT has_pk('users');
SELECT col_is_fk( 'users', ARRAY[ 'family_name', 'given_name' ]);

SELECT has_table( 'widgets' );
SELECT has_pk( 'widgets' );
SLEECT col_is_pk( 'widgets', 'id' );
SELECT fk_ok(
    'widgets',
    ARRAY[ 'user_family_name', 'user_given_name' ],
    'users',
    ARRAY[ 'family_name', 'given_name' ],
);

SELECT * FROM finish();
ROLLBACK;

Pretty cool, right? Check the documentation for all the details.

Speaking of the documentation, that link goes to the new pgTAP Web site. Not only does it include the complete documentation for pgTAP, but also instructions for integrating pgTAP into your application’s preferred test environment. Right now it includes detailed instructions for Perl + Module::Build and for PostgreSQL, but has only placeholders for PHP and Python. Send me the details on those languages or any others into which you integrate pgTAP tests and I’ll update the page.

Oh, and it has a beer. Enjoy.

I think I’ll take a little time off from pgTAP next week to give Bricolage some much-needed love. But as I’ll be given another talk on pgTAP at PostgreSQL Conference West next month, worry not! I’ll be doing a lot more with pgTAP in the coming weeks.

Oh, and one more thing: I’m looking for consulting work. Give me a shout (david

  • at - justatheory.com) if you have some PostgreSQL, Perl, Ruby, MySQL, or JavaScript hacking you’d like me to do. I’m free through November.

That is all.

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pgTAP pgFoundry Project and Lightning Talk

A couple of quick announcements:

pgTAP on pgFoundry

First, the PostgreSQL community approved my project, so now there is a pgTAP project page, including a couple of mail lists, a bug tracker, and downloads. I uploaded a new version shortly after the project was approved, and 0.03 should be there soon, as well.

pgTAP YAPC::NA Lightning Talk

I gave a Lightning talk at YAPC::NA 2008 in Chicago this afternoon. I’ve now posted the slides for your enjoyment.

Care to help me with development? Want to add your own test functions or make it all integrate better with standard PostgreSQL regression tests? Want to help me get Module::Build or Module::Install to run Perl and PostgreSQL and whatever tests side-by-side, all at once? Join the pgtap-users mail list and join the fun!

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