Re: RFC: PGAN

Excerpts from David E. Wheeler's message of Thu Jan 07 17:36:44 -0500 2010:
> I've posted a [plan] to implement [PGAN], a CPAN for PostgreSQL extensions.
> I've tried to closely follow the [CPAN philosophy] to come up with a plan that
> requires a minimum-work implementation that builds on the existing PostgreSQL
> tools and the examples of the [CPAN] and [JSAN]. My hope is that it's full of
> JFDI! I would be very grateful for feedback and suggestions.

Perl's toolchain went through a lot of growing pains in order to let
distributions control their own installation process (./Build) rather than
invoking an external binary (make).

You may want to sidestep some of this pain from the beginning by having the
install process always run something from . instead of depending on make.  e.g.

  ./build
  ./install
  ./installcheck

Maybe your client can even assume make && make install && make installcheck if
any of those executables aren't present, but being able to override them easily
is a huge win for future extensibility.

Even if make is currently the standard, well, that was true of EUMM too; have
you ever tried to extend it?

I've never written a postgres extension, obviously, so all of the above may not
be relevant.

hdp.