Subject: Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely

From: Peter Eisentraut <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2015 16:26:20 -0400

On 5/29/15 5:35 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> But let's get to the point: the real reason for keeping most of these
> contrib modules in the core distribution is that they are essential test
> cases for core's extensibility features.  contrib/isn is actually a good
> example of that.  It made us realize that extensions that create types
> that are physically equivalent to int8 or float8 were broken when we made
> those types potentially pass-by-value; we had to add a CREATE TYPE option
> to allow that to still work (cf commit 3f936aacc057e4b3).  If contrib/isn
> had not been around and been getting built by the buildfarm, we would have
> found that out only much later and with much more pain.

But the generalization of that argument is that we need to keep around
all possible code forever because it might teach us something in the future.

But it is a valid point that we'd need to build up more extension API
tests before we start cutting back significantly on the
maybe-example-maybe-real extensions that we ship in contrib.  We need to
find a good middle ground.

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---

From: Alvaro Herrera <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2015 17:48:16 -0300

> find a good middle ground.

Nowadays we can test concurrent behavior with isolationtester, and we
can test APIs with src/test/modules.  We can now easily add tests for
lots of stuff that we don't currently test, without having modules that
actually produce for-install programs or libraries.

In any case, +1 on moving useful extensions to src/extensions/.  I just
read somewhere (not this thread?) that Debian for their 9.5 packaging is
going to get rid of the postgresql-contrib package, and instead they are
going to ship all that stuff in the main package.  Seems they were
prompted to do this because of our inaction in this area ...

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---

From: David Fetter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Jun 2015 09:55:37 -0700

On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 05:48:16PM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> 
> > But it is a valid point that we'd need to build up more extension
> > API tests before we start cutting back significantly on the
> > maybe-example-maybe-real extensions that we ship in contrib.  We
> > need to find a good middle ground.
> 
> Nowadays we can test concurrent behavior with isolationtester, and
> we can test APIs with src/test/modules.  We can now easily add tests
> for lots of stuff that we don't currently test, without having
> modules that actually produce for-install programs or libraries.
> 
> In any case, +1 on moving useful extensions to src/extensions/.  I
> just read somewhere (not this thread?) that Debian for their 9.5
> packaging is going to get rid of the postgresql-contrib package, and
> instead they are going to ship all that stuff in the main package.
> Seems they were prompted to do this because of our inaction in this
> area ...

I suspect they may also have realized that anything not shipped in the
main distribution can cause enough bureaucratic pain, as in "write a
justification for the legal department for why we should install this
software," to cause things simply never to get installed.

Cheers,
David.
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Skype: davidfetter      XMPP: [email-masked]

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