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PGAdmin3 status
We use the server status portion of PGAdmin3 often at work. Unfortunately, PGAdmin3 is no longer officially supported. The new PGAdmin4 does not have the server status feature. Since the PGAdmin3 software is Open Source, I have no issues continuing to use unsupported software as long as I can build and fix it myself. So, that's what I set about doing.
Before reinventing the wheel and creating all my fixes from scratch, I searched to see if other projects had made similar fixes to PGAdmin3. For a while, BigSQL supported an LTS version of PGAdmin3 and continued to supply executables and patches but they have since given up. From what I read, their patching was very minor and the patches the Debian distribution made were probably better done. BigSQL did offer a Windows executable which was very convenient. We typically run PGAdmin3 on Windows at work.
I found several projects at Github that attempted to continue to patch PGAdmin3. However, when I contacted the projects to see if they were interested in sharing efforts, most of the developers had given up on the idea of continuing to update PGAdmin3. They'd made the switch to other tools. I've searched through many other tools and built some from source out of curiosity but have yet to find something that replaces the functionality I use most with PGAdmin3.
I had decided to go ahead with my own fork of PGAdmin3 based on some of the fixes that others had made to continue to support it after official development stopped. One thing I really wanted was to be able to compile wxWidgets in a more standard way. WxWidgets developers made the switch to using STL for containers and there are other standard compile flags that most distributions typically use. PGAdmin wouldn't build with many of those settings out of the box. So, I went through and fixed all the warnings and errors that occurred while trying to compile PGAdmin3 with a more standard wxWidgets installation. I cherry-picked fixes to update PGAdmin3 to later versions of PostgreSQL based on some of the other forks. I added some fixes of my own for PostgreSQL updates as well. I planned to rework the build system so that it was easier for me to maintain and update. The idea was to switch to CDetect and makefiles rather than using GNU autotools, cmake or standard Visual C++ configuration files. Work on this stopped for a while and when I was ready to pick it up again, I decided to check once more to see if there were any useful forks that were active.
This time, I found there were new and active forks. I haven't had a chance to contact the maintainers and see if they'd like to collaborate on anything yet. However, the ability to use other projects with later versions of PostgreSQL makes the need for my updates much less urgent. I would still like to get a fork together than uses the latest version of wxWidgets and more standard compile settings. It's just not an absolute priority anymore.
I'd like to share links to two of the projects that I found that work with later versions of PostgreSQL and that provide executables for Windows:
https://vvs.ru/pg/index-en.html
https://github.com/levinsv/pgadmin3
If anyone else is still using PGAdmin3 and has ideas on future paths forward, I would be very interested in hearing those opinions. Some possible alternatives:
Fork just the server status piece possibly using another GUI and maintain that as a new program.
Collaborate with one of the active forks.
Continue with a fork that cherry picks the best features of other forks along with original patches.
Before reinventing the wheel and creating all my fixes from scratch, I searched to see if other projects had made similar fixes to PGAdmin3. For a while, BigSQL supported an LTS version of PGAdmin3 and continued to supply executables and patches but they have since given up. From what I read, their patching was very minor and the patches the Debian distribution made were probably better done. BigSQL did offer a Windows executable which was very convenient. We typically run PGAdmin3 on Windows at work.
I found several projects at Github that attempted to continue to patch PGAdmin3. However, when I contacted the projects to see if they were interested in sharing efforts, most of the developers had given up on the idea of continuing to update PGAdmin3. They'd made the switch to other tools. I've searched through many other tools and built some from source out of curiosity but have yet to find something that replaces the functionality I use most with PGAdmin3.
I had decided to go ahead with my own fork of PGAdmin3 based on some of the fixes that others had made to continue to support it after official development stopped. One thing I really wanted was to be able to compile wxWidgets in a more standard way. WxWidgets developers made the switch to using STL for containers and there are other standard compile flags that most distributions typically use. PGAdmin wouldn't build with many of those settings out of the box. So, I went through and fixed all the warnings and errors that occurred while trying to compile PGAdmin3 with a more standard wxWidgets installation. I cherry-picked fixes to update PGAdmin3 to later versions of PostgreSQL based on some of the other forks. I added some fixes of my own for PostgreSQL updates as well. I planned to rework the build system so that it was easier for me to maintain and update. The idea was to switch to CDetect and makefiles rather than using GNU autotools, cmake or standard Visual C++ configuration files. Work on this stopped for a while and when I was ready to pick it up again, I decided to check once more to see if there were any useful forks that were active.
This time, I found there were new and active forks. I haven't had a chance to contact the maintainers and see if they'd like to collaborate on anything yet. However, the ability to use other projects with later versions of PostgreSQL makes the need for my updates much less urgent. I would still like to get a fork together than uses the latest version of wxWidgets and more standard compile settings. It's just not an absolute priority anymore.
I'd like to share links to two of the projects that I found that work with later versions of PostgreSQL and that provide executables for Windows:
https://vvs.ru/pg/index-en.html
https://github.com/levinsv/pgadmin3
If anyone else is still using PGAdmin3 and has ideas on future paths forward, I would be very interested in hearing those opinions. Some possible alternatives:
Fork just the server status piece possibly using another GUI and maintain that as a new program.
Collaborate with one of the active forks.
Continue with a fork that cherry picks the best features of other forks along with original patches.