Re: new procedural language - PL/R

Tom Lane wrote:
> Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> writes:
>>2) Knowing the trend to move stuff *out* of the PostgreSQL source tarball, and
>>assuming plr is released under GPL, is there any chance that it would be
>>accepted into src/pl or contrib, or should I start a gborg project (I'd prefer
>>if it could at least live in contrib)?
>
> I think we'd have to insist on gborg. The only reason there are any
> non-BSD-license items left in contrib is that I haven't finished my TODO
> item to get their licenses changed or remove 'em.

[...snip...]

> BSD would be good. I agree that it'll be a pain in the neck to
> maintain a PL that is not in the main tree, so I'd support accepting it
> if we can get the license right.

I finally got a response from one of the core R developers: "libR is
GPL-ed, and that is unlikely to change" -- so I guess gborg it is :-(
(not that I have anything against gborg ;-))

Before making any release announcements, I'd be interested in feedback
if anyone feels so inclined. The source is currently available here:
http://www.joeconway.com/plr/plr.0.1.1.alpha.tar.gz

The documentation, including preprocessed html, is in the tar ball. I've
also posted the html docs here:
http://www.joeconway.com/plr/index.html

From the README (more or less):
-------------------------------
Installation:
Place tar file in 'contrib' in the PostgreSQL source tree and untar.
Then run:

make
make install
make installcheck

You can use plr.sql to create the language and functions in your
database of choice, e.g.

psql mydatabase < plr.sql
-------------------------------

In addition to the documentation, the plr.out file in plr/expected is a
good source of usage examples.

PL/R should build cleanly with PostgreSQL 7.3.x and cvs HEAD. It was
developed using libR from R 1.6.2 under Red Hat 7.3 & 8.0 -- I've not
tested against other versions of R or different OSes.

Please let me know how it goes.

Thanks,

Joe