Re: Proposal: allow installation of any contrib module

"Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> I believe the reason we keep it separate is so that people can easily
>> make crypto-free versions of PG for use in countries where encryption
>> capability is considered subject to arms regulations. Not sure how
>> important that case really is today, but it was a big consideration
>> last time this was discussed.

> That is a good question but in reality people who need to do so, can get
> the source from a mirror that is outside the country that has the rules.

You miss the point. Everybody knows that those laws are not too hard
to circumvent if you are willing to break the law. The question is
how hard is it for someone to distribute Postgres into one of those
countries *without* breaking any local law. We won't be making things
better if we make it difficult or impossible to put together a
crypto-free PG distribution; we'll just be cutting off some potential
users.

As Peter keeps pointing out, this urge to push everything into core is
misguided anyway. The fact that you can build useful functionality as
extension modules is a strength of PG, not a weakness, and we should
build on that strength instead of running away from it. If you ask me
we should be working on these things:

* Better packaging support, eg make it easier to add/remove an extension
module and control how pg_dump deals with it. We talked about that
awhile back but nobody did anything with the ideas.

* Better documentation for the contrib modules; some of them are
reasonably well doc'd now, but many are not, and in almost all cases
it's only plain text not SGML.

* Better advertising, for instance make the contrib documentation
available on the website (which probably requires SGML conversion
to happen first...)

regards, tom lane