Re: contrib function naming, and upgrade issues

>>>>> "Alvaro" == Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:

>> I've been thinking about this, and my conclusion is that schemas
>> as they currently exist are the wrong tool for making
>> modules/packages.

Alvaro> This has been discussed at length previously, and we even had
Alvaro> an incomplete but substantive patch posted. Did you review
Alvaro> that? Some of it appears to be in line of what you're
Alvaro> proposing here. If you're interested in this area, perhaps
Alvaro> you could pick up where Tom Dunstan left off.

Yes, that's close to what I had in mind.

One difference is that I would be inclined to punt more of the
installation logic into the module itself. If "INSTALL MODULE foo"
worked by calling a specially-declared function in foo.so (if
present), it would give the module more flexibility in terms of what
to install based on the version number requested, etc.; some helper
functions could be provided so that the simpler cases require only a
few lines of code.

Modules not implemented as .so files would have a bit less flexibility
thanks to the fact that we don't have any procedural languages
installed by default; how to do versioning for them would require a
bit more thought. (Maybe have a defaultmodule.so to do the work for
them?)

I will consider working on this at some point.

--
Andrew.