by Dickson S. Guedes

Hello everyone!

I’m proud to tell you that a new version of pgxn_utils was released!

In this version some errors with OpenSSL was fixed (thanks @theory to report then), and now you can release an extension to PGXN in five steps even using Ruby 1.8!

Another change was the executable’s name that changed from pgxn_utils to pgxn-utils for a close integration with next version of PGXN Client, but some work need to be done, yet.

I used pgxn-utils to release itself to PGXN!

$ pgxn-utils release pgxn_utils-0.1.3.zip 
Enter your PGXN username: guedes
Enter your PGXN password: ***********************
Trying to release pgxn_utils-0.1.3.zip ... released successfully!
Visit: http://pgxn.org/dist/pgxn_utils/0.1.3/

Cool, eh? So, since the PGXN’s mirrors were synced and you have pgxn client, you could install pgxn_utils using:

pgxn install pgxn_utils

If you don’t have pgxn client you can install it using rubygems

gem install pgxn_utils

Have fun!

Yesterday was a busy day. In addition to making the first PGXN release, I updated the fundraising spreadsheet and then the thermometer displayed on the main site. The good news is that things are coming along nicely. Thanks to recent contributions from Command Prompt, Marchex, Hitoshi Harada, and 25th-floor, we are now just $2500 short of our goal of $25,000. Thank you all!

Can you help us get to our goal in time for PgWest 2010, which is November 2-4 in San Francisco? I’ll be giving a talk there, “Building and Distributing PostgreSQL Extensions Without Learning C”, in which PGXN will of course be featured. Would be great to announce that the fundraising was successful.

As for the time I’ve put in so far, I’m happy to have PGXN Manager up and working, but of course it has taken more hours than I expected. 76.5 so far. I’d estimated 40. Meanwhile, the database design is up to 43 hours from the estimated 24. And that doesn’t count the hours I spent chasing shiny yaks and shaving them, like SemVer and Router::Resource. Those of you who estimate development projects, take heed! I clearly need to double all my estimates before I submit them.

Still, with the fundraising nearly done, I’m committed to finishing this project. I view it as a project budget, and so that’s what it will be, whether or not it takes me twice or four times as many hours as I’d estimated.

That said, you could help. Right? PGXN Manager is in good shape, but it’s not done. If you’d like to roll up your sleeves and contribute some code, please fork it, build it, and hack what you can. A few things on the to-do list:

• Add user admin interface. Should include checkbox to make and remove administrative permission
• Add mirror admin interface
• Add extension ownership permissions interface

The database API is there for these bits already; the code would mainly be in Perl. Hit me on #pgxn on Freenode if you want to help.

If documentation is your thing, contributions there would be appreciated, as well. In particular, the About PGXN page is a bit thin. Other interfaces will need help, too. More on that as we add users.

Thanks everyone for your support!