Re: RFC: Additional Directory for Extensions

Alvaro Herrera:
> I support the idea of there being a second location from where to load
> shared libraries ... but I don't like the idea of making it
> runtime-configurable. If we want to continue to tighten up what
> superuser can do, then one of the things that has to go away is the
> ability to load shared libraries from arbitrary locations
> (dynamic_library_path). I think we should instead look at making those
> locations hardcoded at compile time. The packager can then decide where
> those things go, and the superuser no longer has the ability to load
> arbitrary code from arbitrary locations.

The use-case for runtime configuration of this seems to be build-time
testing of extensions against an already installed server. For this
purpose it should be enough to be able to set this directory at startup
- it doesn't need to be changed while the server is actually running.
Then you could spin up a temporary postgres instance with the extension
directory pointing a the build directory and test.

Would startup-configurable be better than runtime-configurable regarding
your concerns?

I can also imagine that it would be very helpful in a container setup to
be able to set an environment variable with this path instead of having
to recompile all of postgres to change it.

Best,

Wolfgang