Re: module archive

Am Donnerstag, 25. Oktober 2007 schrieb Andrew Dunstan:
> From time to time people have raised the idea of a CPAN-like mechanism
> for downloading, building and installing extensions and the like (types,
> functions, sample dbs, anything not requiring Postgres itself to be
> rebuilt), and I have been thinking on this for the last few days. What
> sort of requirements would people have of such a mechanism? How do
> people envision it working?

Downloading, building, and installing extensions is actually fairly
standardized already (well, perhaps there are 2 or 3 standards, but CPAN has
that as well). I think the inhibitions relate more to the management of what
is installed.

I imagine we need a package manager inside of PostgreSQL to manage
installation, setup, removal, dependencies and so on. Much like rpm or dpkg
really. That should replace the current "run this .sql file" mechanism, much
like rpm and dpkg replaced the "run make install and trust me" mechanism. I
have some of this mapped out in my head if there is interest.

We'd also need easy integration with the real rpm and dpkg, so that
distribution packages can be built easily and I can run

apt-get install postgresql extension1 extension2

and it's all set up.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/