Re: PATCH: Add hstore_to_json()

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 12:38 PM, David E. Wheeler <david@kineticode.com> wrote:
> On Dec 29, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
>
>> I've been mulling this over and I think this is a pretty good idea.
>> If we could get it done in time for 8.5, we could actually change the
>> output type of EXPLAIN (FORMAT JSON) to the new type.  If not, I'm
>> inclined to say that we should postpone adding any more functions that
>> generate json output until such time as we have a real type for it.  I
>> wouldn't feel too bad about changing the output type of EXPLAIN
>> (FORMAT JSON) from text to json in 8.6, because it's relatively
>> difficult to be depending on that for anything very important.  It's
>> much easier to be depending on something like this, and changing it
>> later could easily break working applications.
>
> +1
>
>> Anyone have an interest in taking a crack at this?
>
> There are a bunch of C libraries listed on http://www.json.org/. Perhaps one has a suitable license and clean enough
implementationto be used? 

It looks like they are all very permissive, though I wonder what the
legal effect of a license clause that the software be used for Good
and not Evil might be.

I guess the question is whether we would slurp one of these into our
code base, or whether we would add an analog of --with-libxml and
provide only a stub implementation when the library is not present.
Any opinions?  Does anyone know whether any of these implementations
are commonly packaged already?

...Robert