Re: Proposal: allow installation of any contrib module

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>>> Oleg Bartunov wrote:
>>>> we have several requests to improve ltree, particularly, people want
>>>> to expand class of allowed symbols and configurable separator, which is
>>>> hard-coded right now. Also, we discussed GiN support for ltree.
>>> O.k. but how does that prevent it from being in core?
>> Once it's in core the expectations for API stability get a lot higher ...
>
> True but any API can be backward compatible for say a release while
> offering the new functionality as well. I fully understand stability in
> core. I certainly don't want any level of instability, even if just
> syntactic.

I don't think two releases from API change to API change is enough -
postgresql is running larger and larger databases by now and I expect
people to upgrade less often in the future (and iirc you already said
something along the lines of recommending such things on occasion to
your customers too).
So if you have things in core you really have to provide a stable API
over a number of releases or in practise - years.
And depending on how the API changed it might not even be possible to
stay backwards compatible so:

>
> Maybe there isn't a good answer.

Indeed there might not be one ...

Stefan