I deployed pgarchives and pglister using a custom application for the auth system. Now we just noticed that the search function did not work because the frontend is deported to pgweb, and pgarchives only provides a json API. What is the rationale behind this? Would it make sense to move the frontend to pgarchives and send a patch here?
The rationale behind it is simply that it makes it possible to make a better experience for the user of the pgweb site. (and it used to be even worse from this perspective - pgweb used to open a postgres connection directly into the archives db and query it). So I don't think we want to move that.
That's not a reason to not also have an interface for it in the archives code itself. It just needs to be made configurable in a way that would allow both use cases.