postgres extensions and postgres multi-version support

[Florian Rothmaier <frothmai@ari.uni-heidelberg.de>]

Hi Christoph, hi Dimitri, (cc: dear mentors)

finally, after quite a long break, I've taken up my work on the postgres
extensions "pgsphere" and "q3c". Christoph might remember this because
he reviewed these packages about one year ago (thanks again for that!).

Since both packages have similar issues, here I'll only refer to the
"q3c" package, see
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=680222
and
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-science/packages/q3c.git .

I'm using "pg_buildext", see
http://manpages.debian.net/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=pg_buildext ,
for my build to allow for supporting several versions of postgres at
the same time.

Currently, my "debian/control" has the following structure:

Source: q3c
...

Package: postgresql-8.4-q3c
...

Package: postgresql-9.0-q3c
...

Package: postgresql-9.1-q3c
...


While looking at other postgres extensions (e.g. "ip4r", "postgis",
"prefix"), I noted that in all cases, the extension is built for one
specific postgres version only, e.g.

"postgresql-9.1-postgis" for the "postgis" source package or
"postgresql-9.3-prefix" for the "prefix" source package in jessie,

so what I'm doing does not seem to be common practice.

Hence my question is: does it make sense to use "pg_buildext" for the
multi-version support of postgres, or will this do more harm than good
and should therefore be dropped?


Thanks in advance for your help,
Florian