Dear Carl,
> What is the purpose of the extension api in simple terms; what is it FOR?
> What does it DO?
Thanks for this perfectly legitimate question, as my mail was not very
easy to understand without the context.
The aim is to provide a compilation infrastructure to external modules
(that is things that are not distributed with the core of postgresql but
must be integrated to it, such as new types or new functions which deal
with backend informations).
The idea is that any external module could have a very simple makefile and
reuse all of postgresql build infrastructure (makefiles, scripts...) to
be build against an already installed postgresql.
I hope this is clearer,
have a nice day,
--
Fabien Coelho - coelho@cri.ensmp.fr