Re: Unsupported 3rd-party solutions (Was: Few questions

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004, Thomas Hallgren wrote:

> Combine that with pre-packaged distributions containing the supported
> modules to be found at the PostgreSQL web site. You ask "What is that
> worth?". I for one claim it's worth a great deal. It would really
> motivate me (and I imagine others) to go further with my product. It
> would give potential users a "product" that contain everything they want
> it to contain. It strengthen PostgreSQL's position as the most advanced
> free database in the market even more.

Its actually worth alot less then you think ... for instance, if we were
to import Slony as part of 8.0 (we won't, but its an example) since it is
"todays fashion for replication", there is no guarantee that for 8.1, we
don't replace it with something that happens to be better then ... then
the person that deployed Slony because it was 'the fashion of the day' is
now using something that is no longer considered "supported"? Do they
change then?

libpq++ is a better example, because it happened ... nobody was working on
it, and someone came along and decided that since he felt it was too
broken, he started to develop his own which became better then what we had
in the tree, even though the one in the tree was considered "the supported
one" ...

The benefit (and drawback) to OSS is that it is possible to have several
potential solutions to the same problem ... in 6 months time, who says
there is no second (or third) implementation of PL/Java out there? Or
pl/PHP?

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