Re: Plugin system like Firefox

Markus Wanner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> IIRC the main problem isn't compilation and packaging of plugins. On 
> your Ubuntu system, for example, you can easily install 
> 'postgresql-contrib-8.x' and get most of the contrib modules as *.so 
> libraries. You'll even find the install_*.sql and uninstall_*.sql 
> scripts in '/usr/share/postgresql/8.x/contrib'.
> 
> The main problem I see is ease of installation and backup/restore 
> capability of these modules. Installing the tsearch2 module with:
> 
>    psql $YOURDB < /usr/share/postgresql/8.x/contrib/tsearch2.sql
> 
> ..is already quite easy to do. But beware of the trouble when trying to 
> back up and restore that database later on!

Well, dump/restore is part of the problem for /contrib but we need
something that handles pgfoundry stuff too, which I doubt is ever going
to be covered sufficiently by any OS-specific solutions.

The bottom line is that for software to be successful we need a critical
mass, and as long as we are doing OS-specific plugins we aren't going to
reach that critical mass because the OS-specific aspect splits up
demand.

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