Re: Let's drop two obsolete features which are bear-traps for novices

Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 11/03/2014 03:41 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Nothing that I recall at the moment, but there is certainly plenty of
>> stuff of dubious quality in there. I'd argue that chkpass, intagg,
>> intarray, isn, spi, and xml2 are all in worse shape than the money type.

> What's wrong with intarray?

The single biggest practical problem with it is that it creates new
definitions of the <@ and @> operators, which cause confusion with the
core operators of those names. For example, we've repeatedly seen bug
reports along the lines of "why does this query not use this index"
because of people trying to use the contrib @> operator with a core GIN
index or vice versa. (In fairness, I think intarray might be older
than the core operators, but that doesn't make this less of a problem.)

Another thing that grates on me is the mostly-arbitrary restriction
to non-null-containing arrays. That's an implementation artifact rather
than something semantically required by the operations.

More generally, it seems like a grab bag of not terribly well designed
features, and the features that do seem well designed seem like they
ought to be more generic than just for int4 arrays. So to me it feels
like proof-of-concept experimentation rather than a production-grade
thing that we could feel good about moving into core.

regards, tom lane