From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
cc: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>,
 "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>,
 "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely
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Comments: In-reply-to Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
 message dated "Thu, 04 Jun 2015 11:30:33 -0400"
Date: Thu, 04 Jun 2015 11:57:36 -0400
Message-ID: <11341.1433433456@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Sender: pgsql-hackers-owner@postgresql.org

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
>> The biggest problem is that packagers tend just to bundle contrib together
>> in one lump. If we could divide it into two, something like "standard
>> modules" and "misc", with the former being included with the server package,
>> I think that would be an advance, although packagers might reasonably want
>> to treat pgcrypto as a special case.

As an ex-packager, I agree that would be a good thing.  In particular
we should try to avoid people packaging stuff that's meant either for
server testing or as sample-source-code-not-useful-in-itself.  We've
made some progress on the former via src/test/modules but I wonder
if we're all the way there; test_decoding surely shouldn't be in
contrib on this measure should it?

BTW, pg_upgrade is also a special case from a packager's viewpoint,
since it needs to be bundled with back-version executables.

> The problem is that it's very hard to agree on which stuff ought to be
> standard and which stuff ought to be misc.  There's probably some
> stuff that almost everyone would agree is pretty useful (like hstore
> and postgres_fdw) but figuring out which stuff isn't useful is a lot
> harder.  Almost anything you say - that's junk - someone else will say
> - no, that thing is great, I use it all the time.  For example, I just
> offered contrib/isn as a sort of archetypal example of stuff that's
> pretty marginal crap and Josh immediately came back and said, hey, I
> use that!  I don't see any principled way of getting past that
> difficulty.  Just because a module isn't regularly used by someone who
> reads -hackers daily doesn't mean it's not worth keeping.

Yeah.  One possible way of measuring this would be to go through the
commit logs and count commits in contrib/ that either added a new
feature or fixed a field-reported bug (ie, did not arise simply from
core-code-driven housekeeping).  Either would be solid evidence that
somebody out there is using it.  Gathering the evidence would be
pretty tedious though :-(

			regards, tom lane


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