Re: POC: rational number type (fractions)

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 7/2/20 10:01 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Yeah. We *must not* simply give up on extensibility and decide that
>> every interesting feature has to be in core. I don't have any great
>> ideas about how we grow the wider Postgres development community and
>> infrastructure, but that certainly isn't the path to doing so.

> I've been thinking about this a bit. Right now there isn't anything
> outside of core that seems to work well. PGXN was supposed to be our
> CPAN equivalent, but it doesn't seem to have worked out that way, it
> never really got the traction.

Yeah. Can we analyze why it hasn't done better? Can we improve it
rather than starting something completely new?

> I'm thinking about something different,
> in effect a curated set of extensions, maintained separately from the
> core. Probably the involvement of one or two committers would be good,
> but the idea is that in general core developers wouldn't need to be
> concerned about these. For want of a better name let's call it
> postgresql-extras. I would undertake to provide buildfarm support, and
> possibly we would provide packages to complement the PGDG yum and apt
> repos. If people think that's a useful idea then those of us who are
> prepared to put in some effort on this can take the discussion offline
> and come back with a firmer proposal.

My only objection to this idea is that competing with PGXN might not
be a great thing. But then again, maybe it would be. Or maybe this
is an intermediate tier between PGXN and core. Anyway, it certainly
seems worth spending more thought on. I agree that we need to do
*something* proactive rather than just hoping the extension community
gets stronger by itself.

regards, tom lane