Re: contrib function naming, and upgrade issues

>>>>> "Alvaro" == Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
>> I've been thinking about this, and my conclusion is that schemas>> as they currently exist are the wrong tool for
making>>modules/packages.
 
Alvaro> This has been discussed at length previously, and we even hadAlvaro> an incomplete but substantive patch
posted. Did you reviewAlvaro> that?  Some of it appears to be in line of what you'reAlvaro> proposing here.  If you're
interestedin this area, perhapsAlvaro> you could pick up where Tom Dunstan left off.
 

Yes, that's close to what I had in mind.

One difference is that I would be inclined to punt more of the
installation logic into the module itself. If "INSTALL MODULE foo"
worked by calling a specially-declared function in foo.so (if
present), it would give the module more flexibility in terms of what
to install based on the version number requested, etc.; some helper
functions could be provided so that the simpler cases require only a
few lines of code.

Modules not implemented as .so files would have a bit less flexibility
thanks to the fact that we don't have any procedural languages
installed by default; how to do versioning for them would require a
bit more thought. (Maybe have a defaultmodule.so to do the work for
them?)

I will consider working on this at some point.

-- 
Andrew.