Re: SQL objects UNITs

On 12/19/2013 08:01 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 10:05 AM, Alvaro Herrera
> <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> Stephen Frost escribió:
>>> * Dimitri Fontaine (dimitri@2ndQuadrant.fr) wrote:
>>>> Basically with building `UNIT` we realise with hindsight that we failed to
>>>> build a proper `EXTENSION` system, and we send that message to our users.
>>> Little difficult to draw conclusions about what out 'hindsight' will
>>> look like.
>> I haven't been keeping very close attention to this, but I fail to see
>> why extensions are so much of a failure.  Surely we can invent a new
>> "kind" of extensions, ones whose contents specifically are dumped by
>> pg_dump.  Regular extensions, the kind we have today, still wouldn't,
>> but we could have a flag, say "CREATE EXTENSION ... (WITH DUMP)" or
>> something.  That way you don't have to come up with UNIT at all (or
>> whatever).  A whole new set of catalogs just to fix up a minor issue
>> with extensions sounds a bit too much to me; we can just add this new
>> thing on top of the existing infrastructure.
> Yep.
>
> I'm not very convinced that extensions are a failure.  I've certainly
> had plenty of good experiences with them, and I think others have as
> well, so I believe Dimitri's allegation that we've somehow failed here
> is overstated.

Indeed. There might be limitations, but what we have is VERY useful.
Let's keep things in proportion here.


> That having been said, having a flag we can set to
> dump the extension contents normally rather than just dumping a CREATE
> EXTENSION statement seems completely reasonable to me.
>
> ALTER EXTENSION foo SET (dump_members = true/false);
>
> It's even got use cases outside of what Dimitri wants to do, like
> dumping and restoring an extension that you've manually modified
> without losing your changes.
>

Yeah, seems like it might have merit.

cheers

andrew