add-ons and kernelization was Time to work on Press Release 8.0

Oliver Elphick wrote:

> It is important to get across to the commercial world that add-ons can
>
>be equally as worthy as the core product. We don't use a commercial
>model for software development, but it's the commercial model that
>suggests that add-ons are less important. I suppose they imagine that
>an add-on product is somehow less reliable; but actually it is one of
>the core developers who has produced this add-on and it is as open to
>review as any other part of Pg.
>
>
>
Agreed completely.

One of the real issues is that many people hear "add-on" and they think
"afterthought, designed by folks who are not core developers." This is
where we get hurt on replication sorts of issues. At the same time,
people don't have the same sort of concerns regarding unofficial Linux
kernel modules.

I understand the advantage of kernelization in PostgreSQL, but to make
this work, perhaps we need a community-maintained distribution which
includes many of these other add-ons. The PostgreSQL project page can
then hold news regarding both commercial and community products. The
actual PostgreSQL core server then need not try to convince everybody
that all these features are available, as the distribution can do this.

It seems to me that we can better strike a balance between promoting and
endorsing different commercial and open source projects while at the
same time providing more wholistic services to the community as this
kernelization progresses. In this regard, we could eventually get rid
of the contrib directory completely.

Any volunteers? ;-) I might have some time to work on this in the next
few months, but no guarantees.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers