Portable, simple means of determining distribution directory

Hi,

This was discussed on pgsql-general 28 Jan 2011.

It would be advantageous to have a portable, simple means of including
a module from the distribution contrib/ directory.

One idea would be some kind of variable expansion with the \i command:
    \i $libdir/contrib/module.sql
Another would be a special command for loading modules, maybe
    loadmod( modname )
There should of course be some reasonable means of informing a user
that these have failed to find the desired module.

Note that several options were discussed.  One could work, but is quite
messy, requiring special installations and code.

Also, this proposal is not an alternative to a full module system as
discussed in
    http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Module_Manager
(although it might facilitate development of such a thing.)

Cheers!


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