Re: text_pattern_ops and complex regexps

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> I think changeable regex flavors turned out to be a bad idea. They can
> wreak all sorts of havoc. You change the setting, SIGHUP, and suddenly
> your application fails to work as expected. Maybe we should make that
> setting PGC_POSTMASTER (or just get rid of it?), and provide was to pass
> flags to change the flavor for particular operations (this is easy for
> function-based stuff but not so easy for operators). That way it
> doesn't intrude in stuff like cached plans and so on.

Maybe so. I think it was originally intended mostly as a
backwards-compatibility measure when we added the support for ARE
flavor. It's pretty likely that no one changes the flavor setting
in practice anymore. If we just locked it down as "advanced always"
then we could simplify the documentation by a measurable amount ...

regards, tom lane