Re: Contributing code

On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 10:54:02PM -0700, Don Y wrote:
> I assumed that the contents of ./contrib have NOT been
> thoroughly tested/reviewed by the Postgres team (though
> that is just an impression I have... i.e. why have those
> features not been INTEGRATED into the codebase?)

contrib has been tested to a reasonable level, maybe not as much as the
core, but by including it, the core team takes some responsibility for
its maintainence.

The reasons they're not integrated are varied:

- They don't need to be. What they do is not required for standards
compliance and most people don't care. However, they're useful to
enough people to ship with the main system.

- What does "integration" mean anyway. Do we really want fuzzy string
matching installed on every postgres system out there by default? In
contrib they're easily available for people who want it.

We're taking advantage of the fact that postgres is modular, which
means we don't need to install heaps of crap into the main system, and
instead users can choose which bits they want.

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.