Re: [HACKERS] Enums patch v2

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> I don't, because there are always those that are knowledgeable enough to
> know how to reduce space lost to padding. So it would be nice to have
> 2-byte enums on-disk, and resolve them based on the column's typid. But
> then, I'm not familiar with the patch at all so I'm not sure if it's
> possible.

Not with this patch, and AFAIK not possible generally, without writing
separate I/O functions for each type. I'd love to be able to do that,
but I don't think it's possible currently. The main stumbling block is
the output function (and cast-to-text function), because output
functions do not get provided the oid of the type that they're dealing
with, for security reasons IIRC. It was never clear to me why I/O
functions should ever be directly callable by a user (and hence open to
security issues), but apparently it was enough to purge any that were
designed like that from the system, so I wasn't going to go down that
road with the patch.

Cheers

Tom