Re: add-ons and kernelization was Time to work on

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, Chris Travers wrote:

> Oliver Elphick wrote:
>
>> It is important to get across to the commercial world that add-ons can
>>
>> be equally as worthy as the core product.  We don't use a commercial
>> model for software development, but it's the commercial model that
>> suggests that add-ons are less important.  I suppose they imagine that
>> an add-on product is somehow less reliable; but actually it is one of
>> the core developers who has produced this add-on and it is as open to
>> review as any other part of Pg.
>>
>>
> Agreed completely.
>
> One of the real issues is that many people hear "add-on" and they think
> "afterthought, designed by folks who are not core developers."  This is where
> we get hurt on replication sorts of issues.  At the same time, people don't
> have the same sort of concerns regarding unofficial Linux kernel modules.
>
> I understand the advantage of kernelization in PostgreSQL, but to make this
> work, perhaps we need a community-maintained distribution which includes many
> of these other add-ons.  The PostgreSQL project page can then hold news
> regarding both commercial and community products.  The actual PostgreSQL core
> server then need not try to convince everybody that all these features are
> available, as the distribution can do this.
>
> It seems to me that we can better strike a balance between promoting and
> endorsing different commercial and open source projects while at the same
> time providing more wholistic services to the community as this kernelization
> progresses.  In this regard, we could eventually get rid of the contrib
> directory completely.

Agreed, which I *believe* is one of the directions that the pginstaller
went for Windows ... I don't imagine it would be possible to extend
pginstaller to be cross-platform, like PgAdmin did, would it?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email: scrappy@hub.org           Yahoo!: yscrappy              ICQ: 7615664