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

[Greg Troxel]

Sandro Santilli <strk at kbt.io> writes:

> 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 ?

Yes - packaging!

So two questions:

  what about the case where there are two users in one database?  Is
  that already a situation where the DBA has to choose what's installed,
  so if either wants raster there is raster and that's ok?

  how should this be packaged?  Is there one postgis package with two
  extensions, or one postgis-noraster and one postgis-raster?  Or is
  there a postgis package that doesn't depend on gdal and a
  postgis-raster that does?

If there are to be two packages, then perhaps there should be two
distribution tarballs.

And then:

  what is the point of not "forcing" people to have raster?  What bad
  thing happens now when someone installs postgis and there is raster
  capability in the db, but nobody ever puts any rasters in?  How does
  not installing raster change what happens in a way that solves any
  problems?

I think the answer is that if nothing in pgsql depends on gdal, then you
don't have to have gdal on the machine, and gdal library changes don't
make you do anything.  But I'm not really sure that's the point.

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