Re: inclusions WAS: Increased company involvement

Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:

> Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> > I'm not saying pgfoundry should be shut down. But trying to force
> > projects out into the sterile landscape where they get little use and
> > little support is a death warrant. And unnecessary.
>
> > I think what I would suggest is going through pgfoundry, and checking in the
> > stable release of any good looking project into the contrib directory of the
> > Postgres distribution.
>
> In other words, decide that pgfoundry is a dead end that will never
> work, and so instead we'll load that maintenance effort back onto the
> core developers.
>
> NO, THANK YOU.

Er. No that's not what I'm saying at all.

What I'm saying is that pgfoundry will eventually happen. It will eventually
be the case that there are enough projects that people will look there when
they need something instead of just assuming it doesn't exist.

But you can't just snap your fingers and make it happen. If all you have is a
couple dozen packages and you banish them to some place nobody knows about
then all that will accomplish is killing them off.

I don't really see the contrib directory taking up much "maintenance effort"
in the recent past. Even major projects like GiST don't really mean Core has
to take the main brunt of the maintenance. It just means that people have a
chance of finding tsearch et al and the upstream maintainers.

I'm mainly thinking about server modules like all of the contrib directories.
I don't see any obvious way to integrate things like pgpool into the same
model.

> It's entirely likely that we haven't figured out how to make pgfoundry
> work yet. But figure it out we must, or the project-as-a-whole will die
> of its own weight. Not everything can be part of the core.

Eventually. But that's not the case today. The existing contrib directory
hasn't killed the project with its weight. And neither will adding half a
dozen more files.

Note that the existence of pgfoundry doesn't mean that the core distribution
won't grow either. Perl has more packages in its core distribution than
Postgres has including contrib and pgfoundry. Many of those packages are also
on CPAN but are included in a base install.

--
greg