This would help resolve a lot of issues people have with extensions as they could use Homebrew installed versions which can be augmented with brew install pgxnclient and pgxnclient install plv8

#779 #773 #728 #644

And this is what it looks like in action:

This looks like a useful addition, and something we have talked about in the past.

At a first glance, I wonder how Homebrew deals with version updates? Does this solution keep working after a brew update?

@jakob that's a good point I'm not 100% sure. Thinking about this more since I submitted the PR. It really might be easier just to allow people to add their own "Postgres" installations in Preferences and then make those available in the dropdown?

Make it less dependent on a 3rd party thing.

Could even be super simple by putting a "Custom" option in the dropdown and when selected it opens up a file browser to select the binaries directory.

Please note that there has already been other attempts in that direction. One can still be found in branch find-other-binaries. I think we should first discuss and agree on a design for such a feature if we are going to support it.

@tbussmann thats fair. I understand supporting and maintaining such a feature can add overhead and turn into issues to track/triage etc…

From my perspective this is a power user feature and as such it may be easiest to add/support the ability just to specify custom "versions" in preferences and then those versions become available in the dropdown menu.

There would need to be work done incase the configuration of said path is invalid (missing binaries) or becomes invalid (deleted etc…)

We could use a combo box like this:

The advantage for power users is that they can create servers with arbitrary binaries (eg. built from source) just by typing something into the box, and it would still allow convenient selection of bundled versions.

I'm not sure if it is too confusing for inexperienced users. What I like about the feature is that it exposes the "inner workings". Selecting a different PostgreSQL version is just changing the path where PostgreSQL is installed. The current popup hides this implementation detail.

Could even be super simple by putting a "Custom" option in the dropdown and when selected it opens up a file browser to select the binaries directory

I think this is something we could easily do which would not confuse inexperienced users.

@jakob only tricky part is the way the UI auto-generates a var path using the known numerical version. If someone put in a custom version there would need to be a deterministic way to generate the var path?

@jakob only tricky part is the way the UI auto-generates a var path using the known numerical version. If someone put in a custom version there would need to be a deterministic way to generate the var path?

We could just use var-custom and let the user pick something else. Or we could check pg_config --version to get the version number, but that's probably overkill. Users are probably going to want to customise the directory anyway.

Closing this in favor of #797 as per our discussions here around an implementation.