Re: Re: Metaphone function attachment

On Fri, 4 May 2001, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> Joel Burton writes:
> 
> > I think, as little things in contrib/, it's easy for people to miss
> > these. With a project page, some discussion, etc. (& a place in contrib/),
> > more people would be able to use these.
> 
> Most of the extension functions and types in contrib should, in my mind,
> eventually be moved into the core.  contrib is a nice place for things
> that we don't really know how/whether they work, but once we're confident
> about the quality we might as well offer it by default.

Yeah, but things do seem to languish there for quite a while. (soundex(),
for instance, was in contrib when I first looked at PG).

Also, some things are in contrib/ that seem a bit out of date (I think
there was still some early RI stuff in there last time I went through it)

I understand the need not to stuff PG full of *everything* -- and perhaps
stuff like soundex(), metaphone(), etc., shouldn't go into the core *. But
I think if we leave them in contrib/, after a while, it feels like there's
an implied comment on the quality/soundness of the code.

Would it work to have a different mechanism for distributing proven yet
out-of-the-mainstream stuff, like soundex(), etc.


* - soundex(), in particular, should go into the core, though. 
Many other DBs have it built in, so users could reasonably have the
expectation that we should have it.

-- 
Joel Burton   <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington