Forwarded to -hackers.
Jonah H. Harris wrote:
> Again, I guess it comes down to what we're willing to let go. If we
> want new users who want certain functionality in the system to be
> happy, we include it. Otherwise, we do as we do now, keeping tons of
> projects on pgfoundry and hoping a user doesn't just pass us by
> because they installed PostgreSQL and didn't see the things they
> want/need in the core. Of course, this will last until MySQL goes
> ahead and adds a Java PL and the user doesn't even glance over at
> us... but I guess that falls back to the argument of, "what kind of
> user do we really want". Almost everyone here who's ever done
> real-world consulting on PostgreSQL has run into PL/Java at some point
> in time, so it is used and used often.
Aside from obviously the big issue of who maintains all the pgfoundry
stuff, I also think that the PostgreSQL family would benefit from a
distribution that is more "and the kitchen sink" style. I do not know
exactly if Bizgres could be considered just that? Or maybe it could get
promoted to be that?
What I mean is I think it makes absolute sense to keep a very stable,
very well maintained core PostgreSQL distribution which is that anyone
should base their distributions on. However I do think that PostgreSQL
is missing out in getting new users aboard that are in the early stages
of evalutation and simply only consider features that they get along
with a default installation (mostly due to lack of better knowledge
about places like pgfoundry). For these kinds of users it would make
sense to provide a distro that has an extended feature list, while
sacrificing maybe a tiny bit of stability because it adds modules that
do not adhere to the same high level of maintaince as PostgreSQL core does.
regards,
Lukas
