tsearch2 in PostgreSQL 8.3?

A lot of work has been done to try to get /contrib/tsearch2 into the
core backend for 8.3, but we have hit a roadblock in how to handle
multiple text search configurations. (FYI, the documentation is at
http://momjian.us/expire/textsearch/HTML/textsearch.html.)

There are three options for controlling text search configurations:

1) have a GUC variable which specifies the default configuration
2) require the configuration to be always specified
3) use the type system to automatically use the right configuration

The problem with #1 is that is it error-prone (easy to mismatch
configurations). One idea was to have the GUC be super-user-only but
then restoring a dump as non-super-user is a problem.

The problem with #2 is that it makes implicit and explicit casting
impossible (there is no place to specify the configuration).

#3 requires more code and is probably not something we want to do at
this stage in 8.3 development. It requires passing typmod values
between functions and operators (not something we have done easily in
the past).

Given this, should we decide to not include full text search in 8.3?

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com

+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +