Re: Core Extensions relocation

On 11/14/2011 10:09 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> I continue to think that we should be trying to sort these by subject
> matter. The term "core extensions" doesn't convey that these are
> server management and debugging tools, hence Josh's confusion.
>

I'm not attached to the name, which I just pulled out of the air for the
documentation. Could just as easily call them built-in modules or
extensions. If the objection is that "extensions" isn't technically
correct for auto-explain, you might call them core add-ons instead. My
thinking was that the one exception didn't make it worth the trouble to
introduce a new term altogether here. There's already too many terms
used for talking about this sort of thing, the confusion from using a
word other than "extensions" seemed larger than the confusion sown by
auto-explain not fitting perfectly.

The distinction I care about here is primarily a packaging one. These
are server additions that people should be able to count on having
available, whereas right now they may or may not be installed depending
on if contrib was added. Everything I'm touching requires our RPM and
Debian packagers (at least) make a packaging change, too. I can't
justify why that's worth doing for any of the other extensions, which is
one reason I don't try to tackle them.

The type of finer sorting you and Thom are suggesting seems like it's
mainly a documentation change to me. I'm indifferent to the idea; no
plans to either work on it or object to it. The docs could be made
easier to follow here without any change to the directory tree, and
trying to push out a larger packaging change has downsides. Useful
reminder reading here is
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2011_Developer_Meeting#Moving_Contrib_Around
To quote from there, "Users hate having loads and loads of packages. We
do need to be careful not to oversplit it." There's some useful notes
about dependency issues there too.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
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