Re: Using textin/textout vs. scribbling around

> Peter's suggestion appears to be a natural step towards the goal of
> being able to provide a defined interface that could be used for
> extensions.  The concern that the _external_ format might change seems
> counter to the effort of providing a stable platform for extending
> PostgreSQL.  If there is a serious possibility that this might occur,
> and because of that we cannot provide any external interface to the
> predefined types, then the well-known advantages of composing software
> modules from well-defined and well-tested components will be largely
> lost for anyone wishing to rapidly extend the system.

Most of the entension API's are written by commercial companies with
closed-source code, so they have to have an API to interface to their
programs.  Also, the API's are often unsuccessful because they are
either unnecessarily complex or can't adapt to new features.  We ship
the code and I think an API could actually hurt us in the long run.

For example, when we added TOAST, it changed how we had to do a few
things.  No one could have anticipated it, and with a few changes all
the plugins worked just like native code.  I don't think an API would
have helped, or if it did, it would have necessiated overhead not
present in the native types.

--  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610)
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