Re: Trim the Fat (Was: Re: Open 7.3 items )

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 02:08:33PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Jul 2002, Tom Lane wrote:

> > One reason for wanting to integrate libpqxx is that I don't think we'll
> > find out anything about its portability until we get a lot of people
> > trying to build it. If it's a separate distro that won't happen quickly.
>
> Who cares? Those that need a C++ interface will know where to find it,
> and will report bugs that they have ... why should it be tested on every
> platform when we *might* only have those on the Linux platform using it?

This seems a bad argument. You can't say "we support interface xyz"
and never test it on anything except i80x86 Linux. Somebady comes
along and tries to make it go on Solaris, and it doesn't work: poof,
the cross-platform reputation that you and other have worked hard to
burnish goes away. Never mind that it's only a client library.

Besides, more generally, Postgres already has a reputation as being
difficult to install. The proposal to separate out all the
"non-basics" (I'm not even sure how one would draw that line: maybe a
server-only package and a client-library package run through GBorg?)
would mean that anyone wanting to do something moderately complicated
would have a yet higher hurdle. Isn't that a problem?

A

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