Re: moving from contrib to bin

On 2014-12-12 11:14:56 -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> I'm not really convinced this is a very good idea. What do we get out
> of moving everything, or even anything, from contrib?

The benefit of moving relevant stuff is that it'll actually be installed
by default when installing postgres on many platforms. That's currently
often not the case. The contrib umbrella, as used by many other
projects, actually justifies not doing so.

I don't think that's a good argument for moving everything, rather the
contrary, but relevant stuff that we properly support should imo be
moved.

> It will make back-patching harder

I think the amount of effort a simple renamed directory which wholly
contains a binary creates is acceptable. Just use patch -p4 instead of
patch -p1...

> Right now, we've got stuff like vacuumlo in contrib which is
> useful but, let's face it, also a cheap hack.

On the other hand, we really don't provide any other solution. Since
large objects are part of core we really ought to provide at least some
support for cleanup.

> If we decide that executables can no longer live in contrib, then
> every time somebody submits something in the future, we've got to
> decide whether it deserves parity with psql and pg_dump or whether we
> shouldn't include it at all. contrib is a nice middle-ground.

I think it makes sense to still have it as a middleground for future
things.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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