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West Columbia
I'm a mercenary systems administrator located in Columbia, SC. My first real hands-on experience with open source software was running Apache on FreeBSD webservers in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, I moved on to Samba, BIND, qmail, postfix, and anything and everything else that grabbed my attention. I currently support Windows, FreeBSD, Debian, and Ubuntu workstations and servers doing just about everything that you can possibly do with any or all of them. RAH said it best - specialization is for insects!
Authored Comments
Look, "the masses" not only don't need to specifically install PostgreSQL 9.1.2, they don't need to know what PostgreSQL *is* in the first place - and won't have to, because the distribution repositories are there to just install the thing they ACTUALLY want, and then install the proper version of whatever RDBMS it wants (if it wants one) as a dependency.
I'm responding to the points that are made. If you'd like to make one that actually *is* relevant to "the masses", I'd be happy to hear and respond to it. =)
Not exactly - it would be closer to accurate to say my arguments paint Linux as "the garden without the wall", replacing the soldiers on the wall with... more gardeners. =)
If you want things to be easy, you stay inside the garden as much as possible. If you aren't satisfied with what's there - well, there's no wall; in fact there are people to help you do whatever you'd like. BUT, the further outside you go, the more of your own sweat you'll need to put into maintenance.
The catch here is that there are way, way too many people who don't really understand the value of the garden to begin with, and just immediately dive headlong for the wilderness and bitch about all the weeds. =)
Also: Postgre really isn't "about as major a package as there is so it's current", in fact it was a great example on your part of a package that's going to be more of a pain to deal with. APACHE is "about as major as it gets", and it's typically going to be pretty damn current without any need for backports or PPAs (or GLAYVEN!); also (sly grin) MySQL. Postgre, technical arguments pro or con aside, is very definitely at this point a second-rater in terms of popularity, which is a lot of the reason it tends to lag further behind.
Again, you pick your own point in comfort - but, hopefully, you do a smart job of it. You want PostgreSQL? Fine. You want a newer version than the one in stable? Cool, we've got unstable and/or backports for you. Not happy with that *either*? Well, OK, there's probably a PPA or third-party apt source to serve your needs. STILL not happy? Well, sure, you can always roll your own from source...
At each stage of the game, you get progressively less support and progressively more of the work of maintenance rolled onto your own shoulders. But they're all *options*, and they're all *there*. Neither the Windows model of "little or nothing is directly supported, deal with the vendor and hope for the best" nor the Apple model of "walled garden, we already have an [x] so we refuse to accept $vendor's competing [x]" offer you that level of choice.