Re: inclusions WAS: Increased company involvement

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes:
> Look at other large projects with lots of options.  Apache, Perl,
> Linux, Java, emacs, KDE, etc., all of them strike a balance between
> including stuff and leaving stuff as add-ins (some more narrowly than
> others), and exclude a lot of popular and useful stuff on a variety of
> criteria.  Our current balance is on the minimalist side, and somewhat
> arbitrary if you look at the /contrib directory.  If you think there's
> a better balance, propose it.  Seriously.

I think quite a lot of the /contrib stuff is there on basically
historical reasons --- ie, it got in before we had gborg or pgfoundry as
alternatives, and no one has felt it worthwhile to crusade to remove it.
(You can't just "remove it" without at least setting up a working
pgfoundry version, so this isn't a zero-effort thing ... whereas leaving
it where it is is close to zero effort ...)

I'd not want to see contrib slimmed down to nothing, because it has good
use as a testbed for problems with our infrastructure for building
external modules.  But a few samples of each basic type of add-on would
be enough for that, I think.
        regards, tom lane