Re: contrib vs. gborg/pgfoundry for replication solutions

Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> writes:
> As I've said on other parts of this thread, my concern with moving
> everything to gborg/pgFoundry is that it raises the bar in terms of
> difficulty if we expect every individual project to develop their own
> infrastructure.

I think that's exactly right. It may be okay for the core project to
decide these little side projects are outside our responsibility ---
but what we had better take responsibility for is a framework within
which it's easy to maintain little side projects. The cost of that
infrastructure is too high to expect the little projects to handle it
individually.

> What we need to really make that work is to provide an
> infrastructure similar to Perl's CPAN or the R project's CRAN.

There's more than one issue. CPAN makes it easy for end users to find
and install little projects. We need that, but we also need to make it
easy for programmers to build and maintain those projects. There was
some speculation earlier in the thread about whether the existing
contrib framework would do as a basis --- I don't know if it can be made
to work, or if it's sufficient, but it might do. In any case we can't
just toss contrib modules over the side and expect that good things will
happen to them when they can't even be built outside the main tree.
The effort to fix that on a retail basis would alone guarantee that
they will be stillborn projects.

regards, tom lane