Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely

On Thu, Jun 04, 2015 at 01:11:21PM -0700, David E. Wheeler wrote:
> On Jun 4, 2015, at 11:53 AM, Neil Tiffin <neilt(at)neiltiffin(dot)com> wrote:
>
> > I have looked at PGXN and would never install anything from it.
> > Why? Because it is impossible to tell, without inside knowledge
> > or a lot of work, what is actively maintained and tested, and what
> > is an abandoned proof-of-concept or idea.
>
> Well, you can see the last release dates for a basic idea of that
> sort of thing. Also the release status (stable, unstable, testing).
>
> > There is no indication of what versions of pg any of PGXN modules
> > are tested on, or even if there are tests that can be run to prove
> > the module works correctly with a particular version of pg.
>
> Yeah, I’ve been meaning to integrate http://pgxn-tester.org/ results
> for all modules, which would help with that. In the meantime you can
> hit that site itself. Awesome work by Tomas Vondra.

Giant +1 for this. I had no idea it existed until this morning. As a
PGXN contributor, this kind of feedback is invaluable to me.

> > There are many modules that have not been updated for several
> > years. What is their status? If they break is there still
> > someone around to fix them or even cares about them? If not, then
> > why waste my time.
>
> These are challenges to open-source software in general, and not
> specific to PGXN.

The pgxn-tester system answers more of that question than a lot of
other projects do. At some point, each organization using software,
free or proprietary, open source or closed, has to do some of their
own vetting.

> > So adding to Jim’s comment above, anything that vets or approves
> > PGXN modules is, in my opinion, essentially required to make PGXN
> > useful for anything other than a scratchpad.
>
> Most of the distributions on PGXN feature links to their source code
> repositories.

Should this just be made a hard requirement for PGXN? Lack of a
source code repo is a pretty good sign of abandonment.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
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