On 7/1/20 7:00 PM, Stephen Frost wrote: > Greetings, > > * Tom Lane (t...@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote: >> Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: >>> I disagree with this and instead lean more towards the side that Robert >>> and Jeff were taking in that this would be a useful extension and >>> something we should consider including in core. I disagree with Tom and >>> Noah, specifically because, if we add this capability then I see our >>> potential use-cases as increasing and therefore getting more individuals >>> interested in working with us- to potentially include new contributors >>> and possibly committers. >> FWIW, I'm entirely in favor of having this available as an extension. >> But I'm not in favor of it being in core. I'm afraid it will end up >> like the geometric types, i.e. a backwater of not-very-good code that >> gets little love because it's not in line with the core competencies >> of a bunch of database geeks. If it's a separate project, then we >> could hope to attract interest from people who know the subject matter >> better but would never dare touch the PG backend in general. There's >> also the whole project-management issue that we have finite resources >> and so we can *not* afford to put every arguably-useful feature in core. > The issue that you highlight regarding geometric types is really that we > simply refuse to punt things from core, ever, and that's not a > reasonable position to take for long-term sanity. On the flip side, > it's ridiculously rare for an extension to have any kind of real > life as an independent project- yes, there's one big exception (PostGIS) > because it's simply ridiculously useful, and a few other cases > where one company/individual or another funds the work of a particular > extension because they need it for whatever, but by and large, > extensions outside of PG simply don't thrive as independent projects. > > There's various potential reasons for that, from being hard to find, to > being hard to install and work with, to the fact that we don't have a > centralized extension system (PGXN isn't really endorsed at all by > core... and I don't really think it should be), and our general > extension management system isn't particularly great anyway. >
Then these are things we should fix. But the right fix isn't including every extension in the core code. cheers andrew -- Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
