Re: Plugin system like Firefox

I can't speak for anyone else, but I much prefer packages that make
use of my operating system's package management system rather than
rolling their own. If I need a perl package that I can't get through
yum, I build my own RPMs rather than installing through CPAN.

I actually think that the biggest hurdle to the adoption of non-core
code is knowing that it's out there to begin with. Firefox advertises
the availability of add-ons VERY prominently, and that is why people
give them a try. www.postgresql.org has a link to pgfoundry on the
home page, but nothing about contrib, and pgfoundry is not as
end-user-friendly as addons.mozilla.org.

And the core documentation doesn't mention contrib or pgfoundry much
either. There is a section on contrib in the docs, but that only
helps you if your question is "What does contrib module X do?". If
your question is "Is there a contrib module X that addresses my
problem?", that's not so easy. For example, if you''re reading the
page on string functions[1], it will tell you that you can do regular
expression matching and substring matching, but they WON'T tell you
that if you're looking for soundex matching, you should look to the
fuzzystrmatch[2] package.

...Robert

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/functions-string.html
[2] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/fuzzystrmatch.html

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> Markus Wanner wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Bruce Momjian wrote:
>> > The bottom line is that for software to be successful we need a critical
>> > mass, and as long as we are doing OS-specific plugins we aren't going to
>> > reach that critical mass because the OS-specific aspect splits up
>> > demand.
>>
>> What about the pgxs toolchain? Doesn't that provide enough
>> OS-abstraction to be usable for projects outside of Postgres itself? If
>> no, why not? (I've currently only used it for extensions under different
>> Linuxen, so I can't tell much about OS-specific aspects of it).
>
> pgxs is very good, but it is for interpolating server information to be
> used during a compile; it does not deal with packaging.
>
>> Are you proposing that we should introduce our own packaging system for
>> such add-on components? Like CP(g)AN (which has been proposed before..)?
>
> Yes, pretty much. I imagine some kind of web interface or Java app (did
> I just say that?) that lists all plugins and when you choose one it
> downloads an object file appropriate for your operating system plus SQL
> scripts and somehow automatically installs them in the desired database.
>
> That is the kind of capability we need to really advance things. We
> would still allow source installs but for people wanting to try things
> out, I see no other alternative, and "try things out" == adoption.
>
> --
> Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
> EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com
>
> + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
>
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