Re: RFC: Remove contrib entirely

On 5/29/15 5:35 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> But let's get to the point: the real reason for keeping most of these
> contrib modules in the core distribution is that they are essential test
> cases for core's extensibility features. contrib/isn is actually a good
> example of that. It made us realize that extensions that create types
> that are physically equivalent to int8 or float8 were broken when we made
> those types potentially pass-by-value; we had to add a CREATE TYPE option
> to allow that to still work (cf commit 3f936aacc057e4b3). If contrib/isn
> had not been around and been getting built by the buildfarm, we would have
> found that out only much later and with much more pain.

But the generalization of that argument is that we need to keep around
all possible code forever because it might teach us something in the future.

But it is a valid point that we'd need to build up more extension API
tests before we start cutting back significantly on the
maybe-example-maybe-real extensions that we ship in contrib. We need to
find a good middle ground.