Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely

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. There's probably some
stuff that almost everyone would agree is pretty useful (like hstore
and postgres_fdw) but figuring out which stuff isn't useful is a lot
harder. Almost anything you say - that's junk - someone else will say
- no, that thing is great, I use it all the time. For example, I just
offered contrib/isn as a sort of archetypal example of stuff that's
pretty marginal crap and Josh immediately came back and said, hey, I
use that! I don't see any principled way of getting past that
difficulty. Just because a module isn't regularly used by someone who
reads -hackers daily doesn't mean it's not worth keeping.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company