What I question is whether they need to be a part of the internal development of PostgreSQL. To me, CPAN is an integral part of being able to do Perl development effectively.
Whether or not a VPAN setup could come to seem as natural and easy for new users to use, I don't know. Regardless, these new views are going to need to be documented similarly so that new users are aware of them.
And it still isn't clear (to me) how the debate over how to shape them as included by default will resolve, so punting to an externally maintained repository is just a suggestion as an alternative.
I think it's important to consider the perspective of both developers and users, and the internal views clearly creates issues for the developers.
-tfo
-- Thomas F. O'Connell Co-Founder, Information Architect Sitening, LLC
Strategic Open Source: Open Your i™
http://www.sitening.com/ 110 30th Avenue North, Suite 6 Nashville, TN 37203-6320 615-260-0005
On May 11, 2005, at 11:35 AM, Josh Berkus wrote:
Thomas, All,
I guess I'm having difficulty understanding why the system catalogs themselves and provision of support for information_schema are not sufficient for what exists in core.
Because you can't answer the question: "What tables does user phil have update
permissions on?" or "How many overloaded versions of function
df_new_company() do I have?", and similar, without doing advanced queries on
the system tables. Queries which are prone to mistakes: earlier on this
thread a *pgsql hacker* posted a sample system catalog query which contained
a mistake. Asking our general users to navigate the complexity of the system
catalogs is just not good application practice.
I don't really think a "VPAN" is any kind of solution for this purpose (though
I'd like it for other things). The purpose of these views is to make
PostgreSQL more user-friendly, and telling people: "Oh just go to
http://name/of/obscure/site, lookup these 10 views, log in as superuser and
load them and you're golden" is not much of an improvement in
user-friendliness.
To reiterate my point previously: these system views are NOT aimed at the
people on *this* list; they are for the people on the -NOVICE and - GENERAL
lists and IRC and the people who don't yet use PostgreSQL. Please stop
thinking exclusively in terms of whether they would be useful to you,
personally.
-- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco
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