Re: deprecating contrib for PGXN

On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 12:15 PM, David E. Wheeler <david(at)kineticode(dot)com> wrote:
> On May 18, 2011, at 10:30 AM, Dimitri Fontaine wrote:
>
>> The other problem is that the facility we need to provide the most is
>> binary distributions (think apt-get).  Lots of site won't ever compile
>> stuff on their production servers.  So while PGXN is a good tool, it's
>> not a universal answer.
>
> Yeah, I would think that, *if* we were to seriously look at deprecating contrib (and I'm not suggesting that at all), one would *first* need to solve the binary distribution problems.
>
> I think building tools so that PGXN distributions are automatically harvested and turned into StackBuilder/RPM/.deb binaries would be the place to start on that.

Yep, that seems pretty apropos.

And for sure, we'd want to have the "contrib" material easily included
via PGXN-derived packages *before* deprecating them from the 'core'.

It ought to be reasonably easy to cope with "contrib" material
switching between 'core' and 'some other well-identifiable place';
that's merely the matter of having a pointer point into contrib or
into some place else.

(I have observed this, and I'm sure Dimitri can concur, with the way
the el-get package manager for Emacs can point to packages in a
diverse set of kinds of places, including dpkg, Git repos, bzr repos,
or pulling them via wget from wikis and such.)

It'll be time to drop the contrib material from the "core" when that
shift leads to a 1 line configuration change somewhere that leads to
packages for Debian/Fedora/Ports drawing their code from the new spot.

I'd fully expect that to wait until a year or more from now.
--
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