Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From David E. Wheeler
Subject Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely
Date
Msg-id 4C56D038-B648-41DC-A1A0-ABE79328391C@justatheory.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely  (Neil Tiffin <neilt@neiltiffin.com>)
Responses Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely  (Jim Nasby <Jim.Nasby@BlueTreble.com>)
Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely  (David Fetter <david@fetter.org>)
Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely  (Neil Tiffin <neilt@neiltiffin.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Jun 4, 2015, at 11:53 AM, Neil Tiffin <neilt@neiltiffin.com> wrote:

> I have looked at PGXN and would never install anything from it.  Why?  Because it is impossible to tell, without
insideknowledge or a lot of work, what is actively maintained and tested, and what is an abandoned proof-of-concept or
idea.

Well, you can see the last release dates for a basic idea of that sort of thing. Also the release status (stable,
unstable,testing). 

> There is no indication of what versions of pg any of PGXN modules are tested on, or even if there are tests that can
berun to prove the module works correctly with a particular version of pg. 

Yeah, I’ve been meaning to integrate http://pgxn-tester.org/ results for all modules, which would help with that. In
themeantime you can hit that site itself. Awesome work by Tomas Vondra. 

> There are many modules that have not been updated for several years.  What is their status?  If they break is there
stillsomeone around to fix them or even cares about them?  If not, then why waste my time. 

These are challenges to open-source software in general, and not specific to PGXN.

> So adding to Jim’s comment above, anything that vets or approves PGXN modules is, in my opinion, essentially required
tomake PGXN useful for anything other than a scratchpad. 

Most of the distributions on PGXN feature links to their source code repositories.

> A big help would be to pull in the date of the last git commit in the module overview and ask the authors to edit the
readmeto add what major version of pg the author last tested or ran on. 

That’s difficult to maintain; I used to do it for pgTAP, was too much work. pgxn-tester.org is a much better idea.

Best,

David



pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Guillaume Lelarge
Date:
Subject: Re: Publish autovacuum informations
Next
From: "David E. Wheeler"
Date:
Subject: Re: Further issues with jsonb semantics, documentation