Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> A big help would be to pull in the date of the last git commit in the module overview and ask the authors to edit the readme to add what major version of pg the author last tested or ran on.

That’s difficult to maintain; I used to do it for pgTAP, was too much work. pgxn-tester.org is a much better idea.

Best,

David