In prior articles we talked about the new PostgreSQL 9.1 extension model
and upcoming PostGIS 2.0 extensions which we have experimental builds of so far.
In this article and other's to follow, we shall provide a documentary of our venture into this new extensions world. We'll discuss some of the obstacles we had with building
extensions, lessons learned, and foolishness exposed, with the hope that others can learn from our experience.
First off, the upcoming PostGIS 2.0 extensions will be packaged as at least two extensions -- postgis which will contain both PostGIS geometry/geography types, functions, meta views and tables as well as raster type and associated functions and tables. Topology support, while a part of upcoming PostGIS 2.0, will be packaged as a separate extension called postgis_topology. The main reason for breaking topology out as a separate extension is that it is always stored in a schema called topology and is not relocatable
to another schema. The way the current extension model works, all the parts of your extension should live in the same schema. Later we plan to package tiger geocoder as an extension, but this one probably makes more sense to live on http://pgxn.org/ since it is only of interest to United States users,
, is purely plpgsql with dependency on PostGIS, and we had beefed it up as part of a consulting contract for a company running PostGIS 1.5. It's the only piece documented in PostGIS 2.0 that works on 1.5 as well (aside from the tiger toplogy loader which has dependency on toplogy), although it has always lived as an extra in the PostGIS code base.
We'll probably package postgis_legacy_functions as an extension too for those people who badly need those 500 alias functions I chucked.
We mentioned in our prior article that we ran into some issues with how our extension worked -- e.g. topology referencing the postgis extension. Most of these turned out just to be ignorance on my part as to how the different pieces fit together and I'll elaborate on these.
Much of what will be described here is also documented in Packaging Related Objects into an Extension.
In the future I'm hoping we'll also see plr and pgrouting packaged as extensions which are common favorites of PostGIS users.
