Re: Official adoption of PGXN

On 02/14/2017 12:05 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jim Nasby <Jim(dot)Nasby(at)BlueTreble(dot)com> writes:
>> First, just to clarify: my reasons for proposing "core adoption" of PGXN
>> are not technical in nature.
>
> What do you think "core adoption" means? Surely not that anything
> associated with PGXN would be in the core distro.

One part of this would need to be having a designated committee of the
Postgres community pick a set of "blessed" extensions for packagers to
package. Right now, contrib serves that purpose (badly). One of the
reasons we haven't dealt with the extension distribution problem is that
nobody wanted to take on the issue of picking a list of blessed extensions.

>
>> Right now contrib is serving two completely separate purposes:
>
>> 1) location for code that (for technical reasons) should be tied to
>> specific PG versions
>> 2) indication of "official endorsement" of a module by the community
>
> This argument ignores what I think is the real technical reason for
> keeping contrib, which is to have a set of close-at-hand test cases
> for extension and hook mechanisms. Certainly, not every one of the
> existing contrib modules is especially useful for that purpose, but
> quite a few of them are.

Yes. But there's a bunch that aren't, and those are the ones which we
previously discussed, the ones with indifferent maintenance like ISN and
Intarray.

You have to admit that it seems really strange in the eyes of a new user
that ISN is packaged with PostgreSQL, whereas better-written and more
popular extensions (like plv8, pg_partman or pgq) are not.

--
Josh Berkus
Containers & Databases Oh My!