Contrib made sense years ago. It does not any longer. Let's put the old horse down and raise a new herd of ponies on a new pasture.
Still there is strong sense - it is a referential implementation of our extension API. We need it to find regressions, changes. I don't believe
No, then we need a proper test suite for the extension API.
maybe partially, but it is.
so external extensions can do it. Only PostGIS is massively accepted and developed by more than few people. Personally I am thinking so removing contrib is not good idea.
Is there an extension/contrib module in the last decade that more than once has shown to help us with that?
What I know - 9.5 transformations for testing on more platforms.
It is hard to calculate how often the code from contrib helps - but any feature last four years has not to break contrib test too, so I believe it enforce better API stability.
It is hard to imagine to design and maintaining any extension API without platform like contrib. It can be renamed, divided, but some like contrib must exists in core code base if PostgreSQL should be extensible database.
Sincerely,
JD
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