On 11/14/2011 10:09 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
I continue to think that we should be trying to sort these by subject matter. The term "core extensions" doesn't convey that these are server management and debugging tools, hence Josh's confusion.
I'm not attached to the name, which I just pulled out of the air for the documentation. Could just as easily call them built-in modules or extensions. If the objection is that "extensions" isn't technically correct for auto-explain, you might call them core add-ons instead. My thinking was that the one exception didn't make it worth the trouble to introduce a new term altogether here. There's already too many terms used for talking about this sort of thing, the confusion from using a word other than "extensions" seemed larger than the confusion sown by auto-explain not fitting perfectly.
The distinction I care about here is primarily a packaging one. These are server additions that people should be able to count on having available, whereas right now they may or may not be installed depending on if contrib was added. Everything I'm touching requires our RPM and Debian packagers (at least) make a packaging change, too. I can't justify why that's worth doing for any of the other extensions, which is one reason I don't try to tackle them.
The type of finer sorting you and Thom are suggesting seems like it's mainly a documentation change to me. I'm indifferent to the idea; no plans to either work on it or object to it. The docs could be made easier to follow here without any change to the directory tree, and trying to push out a larger packaging change has downsides. Useful reminder reading here is http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_Developer_Meeting#Moving_Contrib_Around To quote from there, "Users hate having loads and loads of packages. We do need to be careful not to oversplit it." There's some useful notes about dependency issues there too.
-- Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US g...@2ndquadrant.com Baltimore, MD PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
