On Nov 15, 2007, at 8:57 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2007 at 10:41:23AM -0600, Tony Caduto wrote:
>>
>> So if you are using Oracle do you have to go through the hassle of
>> finding it, then compiling and installing it?
>
> This canard comes up every time we discuss keeping the codebase
> lean, and I
> say the same thing every time: Oracle (and DB2, and MySQL, and SQL
> Server,
> and everyone else) _do so_ have all these add ons. They just
> package it in
> one thing sometimes, and you think it's "one system". It is one
> system.
> It's not one program.
>
> This is what packagers are for.
Yup. Core vs not-core is for the convenience of the developers,
not the users.
But one difference between PG and others is that there are a lot of
different packagers, who bundle a variety of different subsets of the
addons, effectively creating a number of quite different products,
even though they're all called postgresql.
At one point you could expect that stuff in contrib would likely
be available via package (at least as a -contrib package) and
that stuff on gborg wouldn't be.
Now contrib is mostly going away, the windows installer bundles
all sorts of things that aren't obviously available via other
packages, so there are an awful lot of versions of the postgresql
application, some very different from a users point of view.
I tend to think of that as feature as much as bug, but it does
cause some confusion while trying to provide ad-hoc support
to new users.
Cheers,
Steve
