Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely

On 6/4/15 10:30 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Andrew Dunstan<andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
>> >The biggest problem is that packagers tend just to bundle contrib together
>> >in one lump. If we could divide it into two, something like "standard
>> >modules" and "misc", with the former being included with the server package,
>> >I think that would be an advance, although packagers might reasonably want
>> >to treat pgcrypto as a special case.
> The problem is that it's very hard to agree on which stuff ought to be
> standard and which stuff ought to be misc.

What I took away upthread was the idea here was to distinguish things
that were "intended as a POC (like worker_spi,
auth_delay and test_decoding)" from everything else.

I think the real problem here that we're skirting around is this idea of
'blessed extensions', because that's really the only user benefit
contrib brings: the idea that this stuff is formally blessed by the
community. If that's really what we're after then we should just be
explicit about that. Then we can decide if the best way to approach that
is keeping it in the main repo (as opposed to say, publishing a list of
explict PGXN package versions and their checksums).

Personally, I'd rather we publish a list of formally vetted and approved
versions of PGXN modules. There are many benefits to that, and the
downside of not having that stuff as part of make check would be
overcome by the explicit testing we would need to have for approved modules.
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com