Plugin system like Firefox

Matthew T. O'Connor wrote:
> A few random thoughts...
> 
> The application that comes to mind first for me when you talk plugins is 
> Firefox.  They make it very easy to browse for plugins and to install, 
> update, remove them.  Their plug-in system also tries to account for 
> Firefox version and OS platform which we would need to do also.
> 
> Perhaps one thing that would help PostgreSQL plug-ins is a nice GUI 
> plug-in browser and management application.  The logical place to add 
> this IMHO is PGAdmin since it is GUI, already talks to the DB and is 
> cross platform.  I'm not saying a GUI should be required to manage 
> plug-ins, a fully CLI option should be made available too.

I feel the above comment about Firefox is the crux of the plugin issue. 
Having per-operating system options for each plugin is never going to
scale.

Having users compile/install these plugins works, but the effort
required discourages their use, and the fewer people that try them the
fewer people use them and contribute back to the Postgres plugin
ecosystem.

This is similar to the problem of installing Postgres before we had
per-OS installs and Postgres software bundles like the Win32 installer
and Postgres Plus.

The Firefox plugins are successful because it is easy to install stuff.
I run Ubuntu on my laptop so I can easily install software --- I can
compile/install software from source, but I prefer to use the Ubuntu
software install system so I can concentrate on my major task.

So, ideally, if we do a plug-in system, I think we need some way to have
these plugins be very easily installed, perhaps by choosing object files
pre-compile by the build farm for each operating system.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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