Re: [GENERAL] Notify argument?

On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 04:10:14PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > The breakage will come when we lengthen NAMEDATALEN, which I plan to
> > tackle for 7.3. We will need to re-order the NOTIFY structure and put
> > the NAMEDATALEN string at the end of the struct so differing namedatalen
> > backend/clients will work. If you want to break it, 7.3 would probably
> > be the time to do it. :-) Users will need a recompile pre-7.3 to use
> > notify for 7.3 and later anyway.
>
> If we're going to change the structure anyway, let's fix it to be
> independent of NAMEDATALEN.

Sounds good. If we're making other backwards-incompatible changes to
pgNotify, one thing that bugs me about the API is the use of "relname"
to refer to name of the NOTIFY/LISTEN condition. This is incorrect
because the name of a condition is _not_ the name of a relation -- there
is no necessary correspondence between these. The names of NOTIFY
conditions are arbitrary, and chosen by the application developer.

The same terminology is used in the backend NOTIFY/LISTEN code (e.g.
pg_listener), but the major source of incompatibility will be the change
to libpq. Would it be a good idea to rename "relname" to something more
sensible?

Cheers,

Neil

--
Neil Conway <neilconway(at)rogers(dot)com>
PGP Key ID: DB3C29FC