[postgis-devel] Allowing use of PostGIS EXTENSION w/out raster

[Sandro Santilli]

I'm starting this thread to gather opinions about two current
proposals for allowing people to use POSTGIS via the EXTENSION
mechanism but w/out being forced to also have RASTER.

The proposals are:

 1) Move raster to its own extension "postgis_raster"
    See https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/3888

 2) Provide two versions of extension "postgis"
    See https://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/3890

Implementation of the first proposal is ready for test in a git
branch (https://git.osgeo.org/gogs/postgis/postgis/pulls/18)

For each proposal we should consider:

 - How users can enable/disable raster
   proposal 1: CREATE/DROP EXTENSION postgis_raster
   proposal 2: ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE TO "<x>"/"<x>noraster"

 - How users can upgrade from older versions of postgis
   p1: ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE; CREATE EXTENSION postgis_raster FROM unpackaged;
   p2: ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE; -- what if default version is w/out raster ?

 - How users can update to future versions of postgis
   p1: ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE; ALTER EXTENSION postgis_raster UPDATE;
   p2: ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE; -- what you get depends on installed flavor

Anything else to consider ?

--strk;