Re: Finer Extension dependencies

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:01 AM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> wrote:
> Robert Haas  wrote:
>
>> I think that technically this patch can be polished well enough to
>> commit in the time we have available, but the question of whether
>> it's the right design is harder, and I don't want that to be my
>> call alone.
>
> I gather from previous posts that the intent isn't to allow different
> packages from different authors to provide a common and compatible
> feature; but what happens in the current design if someone
> accidentally or maliciously produces an extension which provides the
> same feature name as another extension?
>
> Would we need some registry?

One thing I was thinking about was whether we should restrict feature
names to be of some specific form, like extension_name:feature_name.
That would address this issue, and would also keep people from
thinking of this as an alternatives mechanism, as I did.

Of course, that doesn't prevent someone from publishing an ip4r module
that erases your hard disk, but there's nothing much we can do about
that problem from within core PostgreSQL.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company