On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 5:46 AM, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote:> > Assuming the command in > question can be stuffed inside a function, the most you're gaining is > a little notational convenience
I can answer that one (why a full-blown mechanism for a notational convenience). It has occurred to me to use this mechanism to support extensions, but I find the prospect of having to teach people special operators to understand how to use the standard extension feature an unstomachable prospect. The single biggest problem is that pg_restore will not know to call this function rather than run CREATE EXTENSION, and then two databases, prepared exactly the same cannot be pg_dump-ed and restored in a reasonable way. If there's a definable whitelist, then this vital functionality will work. There are other sicknesses imposed if one has to hack up how to delegate extension creation to non-superusers: * The postgres manual, wiki, and ecosystem of recipes on the web and internet at large basically are not going to work without modification. Death by a thousand cuts. * "\df" in psql displays some new operators that you aren't familiar with. Also, putting aside your pg_dump/pg_restore generated SQL will not work, they will look funny. This is an eyesore. * If one tells someone else "yeah, the system supports extensions", they're going to type CREATE EXTENSION. And then it's not going to work, and then they're either going to give up, yak shave for a few hours figuring out what they were "supposed" to do for their provider or organization, or maybe worst of all hack their way around functionality the extension could have provided in a cleaner way had it just worked nice and tidy to begin with. I find this functionality basically vital because it greatly decreases the friction between people, organizations, and software in the domain of deploying, reasoning, and communicating about the installation and status of Postgres extensions in a database. -- fdr -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
