Re: Greatest Common Divisor

On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 1:10 PM Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> Just stop doing it. It's very little extra work to package an item
> into an extension and this protects your hapless users who might have
> implemented a function called gcd() that does something different.
> Ideally, the public namespace should contain (by default) only sql
> standard functions with all non-standard material in an appropriate
> extension. Already released material is obviously problematic and
> needs more thought but we ought to at least stop making the problem
> worse if possible.

There are counter-arguments to that, though. Maintaining a lot of
extensions with only one or two functions in them is a nuisance.
Having things installed by default is convenient for wanting to use
them. Maintaining contrib code so that it works whether or not the SQL
definitions have been updated via ALTER EXTENSION .. UPDATE takes some
work and thought, and sometimes we screw it up.

I don't find any position on this topic to be without merit.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company