I’ve been working on skytools3 packaging lately. I’ve been pushing quite a lot of work into it, in order to have exactly what I needed out of the box, after some 3 years of production and experiences with the products. Plural, yes, because even if pgbouncer and plproxy are siblings to the projets (same developers team, separate life cycle and releases), then skytools still includes several sub-projects.

Here’s what the skytools3 packaging is going to look like:

skytools3              Skytool's replication and queuing
python-pgq3            Skytool's PGQ python library
python-skytools3       python scripts framework for skytools
skytools-ticker3       PGQ ticker daemon service
skytools-walmgr3       high-availability archive and restore commands
postgresql-8.4-pgq3    PGQ server-side code (C module for PostgreSQL)
postgresql-9.0-pgq3    PGQ server-side code (C module for PostgreSQL)

This split is needed so that you can install your daemons (we call them consumers) on separate machines than where you run PostgreSQL. But for the walmgr part, it makes no sense to install it if you don’t have a local PostgreSQL service, as it’s providing archive and restore commands. Then the ticker, you’re free to run it on any machine really, so just package it this way (in skytools3 the ticker is written in C and does not depend on the python framework any more).

What you can’t see here yet is the new goodies that wraps it as a quality debian package. A new skytools user is created for you when you install the skytools3 package (which contains the services), along with a skeleton file /etc/skytools.ini and a user directory /etc/skytools/. Put in there your services configuration file, and register those service in the /etc/skytools.ini file itself. Then they will get cared about in the init sequence at startup and shutdown of your server.

The services will run under the skytools system user, and will default to put their log into /var/log/skytools/. The pidfile will get into /var/run/skytools/. All integrated, automated.

Next big TODO is about documentation, reviewing it and polishing it, and I think that skytools3 will then get ready for public release. Yes, you read it right, it’s happening this very year! I’m very excited about it, and have several architectures that will greatly benefit from the switch to skytools3. More on that later, though! (Yes, my to blog later list is getting quite long now).