On 6/11/23 22:15, Joel Jacobson wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 11, 2023, at 17:03, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> On 6/11/23 12:26, Joel Jacobson wrote:
>>> I think there are some good arguments that speaks in favour of including it in core:
> ...
>>
>> I agree with all of that, but ...
>>
>> It's just past feature freeze, so the earliest release this could appear
>> in is 17, about 15 months away.
>>
>> Once stuff gets added to core, it's tied to the release cycle, so no new
>> features in between.
>>
>> Presumably people would like to use the extension in the release they
>> already use, without backporting.
>>
>> Postgres is extensible for a reason, exactly so that we don't need to
>> have everything in core.
>
> Interesting, I've never thought about this one before:
> What if something is deemed to be fundamental and therefore qualify for core inclusion,
> and at the same time is suitable to be made an extension.
> Would it be possible to ship such extension as pre-installed?
>
I think it's always a matter of judgment - I don't think there's some
clear set into a stone. If something is "fundamental" and can be done in
an extension, there's always the option to have it in contrib (with all
the limitations I mentioned).
FWIW I'm not strictly against adding it to contrib, if there's agreement
it's worth it. But if we consider it to be a fundamental data structure
and widely useful, maybe we should consider making it a built-in data
type, with fixed OID etc. That'd allow support at the SQL grammar level,
and perhaps also from the proposed SQL/PGQ (and GQL?). AFAIK moving data
types from extension (even if from contrib) to core is not painless.
Either way it might be a nice / useful first patch, I guess.
> What was the json/jsonb story, was it ever an extension before
> being included in core?
I don't recall what the exact story was, but I guess the "json" type was
added to core very long ago (before we started to push back a bit), and
we added some SQL grammar stuff too, which can't be done from extension.
So when we added jsonb (much later than json), there wasn't much point
in not having it in core.
regards
--
Tomas Vondra
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company