Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2015 08:28:21 -0700
From: David Fetter <david@fetter.org>
To: "David E. Wheeler" <david@justatheory.com>
Cc: Neil Tiffin <neilt@neiltiffin.com>, Jim Nasby <Jim.Nasby@BlueTreble.com>,
 Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
 Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>, Josh Drake <jd@commandprompt.com>,
 "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely
Message-ID: <20150605152821.GD15895@fetter.org>
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On Thu, Jun 04, 2015 at 01:11:21PM -0700, David E. Wheeler wrote:
> On Jun 4, 2015, at 11:53 AM, Neil Tiffin <neilt@neiltiffin.com> wrote:
> 
> > I have looked at PGXN and would never install anything from it.
> > Why?  Because it is impossible to tell, without inside knowledge
> > or a lot of work, what is actively maintained and tested, and what
> > is an abandoned proof-of-concept or idea.
> 
> Well, you can see the last release dates for a basic idea of that
> sort of thing. Also the release status (stable, unstable, testing).
> 
> > There is no indication of what versions of pg any of PGXN modules
> > are tested on, or even if there are tests that can be run to prove
> > the module works correctly with a particular version of pg.
> 
> Yeah, I’ve been meaning to integrate http://pgxn-tester.org/ results
> for all modules, which would help with that. In the meantime you can
> hit that site itself. Awesome work by Tomas Vondra.

Giant +1 for this.  I had no idea it existed until this morning.  As a
PGXN contributor, this kind of feedback is invaluable to me.

> > There are many modules that have not been updated for several
> > years.  What is their status?  If they break is there still
> > someone around to fix them or even cares about them?  If not, then
> > why waste my time.
> 
> These are challenges to open-source software in general, and not
> specific to PGXN.

The pgxn-tester system answers more of that question than a lot of
other projects do.  At some point, each organization using software,
free or proprietary, open source or closed, has to do some of their
own vetting.

> > So adding to Jim’s comment above, anything that vets or approves
> > PGXN modules is, in my opinion, essentially required to make PGXN
> > useful for anything other than a scratchpad.
> 
> Most of the distributions on PGXN feature links to their source code
> repositories.

Should this just be made a hard requirement for PGXN?  Lack of a
source code repo is a pretty good sign of abandonment.

Cheers,
David.
-- 
David Fetter <david@fetter.org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778  AIM: dfetter666  Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: david.fetter@gmail.com

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