Re: Extension Templates S03E11

On Wed, 2013-12-04 at 14:54 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> I think Stephen has already argued why it could be a good idea here.
> But in a nutshell: it seems like there are two use-cases to be
> supported, one where you want "CREATE EXTENSION hstore" to give you
> some appropriate version of hstore, and one where you want to restore
> exactly what you had on the previous installation.  It seems to me that
> "exploding" the extension by dumping, rather than suppressing, its
> component objects is by far the most reliable way of accomplishing the
> latter.

The behavior of an extension should not depend on how it was installed.

The kind of "extension" being described by Stephen will:

* Not be updatable by doing "ALTER EXTENSION foo UPDATE TO '2.0'"
* Dump out objects that wouldn't be dumped if they had installed the
extension using the filesystem

So if we do it this way, then we should pick a new name, like "package".

And then we'll need to decide whether it still makes sense to use an
external tool to transform a PGXN extension into a form that could be
loaded as a package.

Regards,Jeff Davis