Re: Bootstrap DATA is a pita

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> On 03/04/2015 09:51 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> >>>and make it harder to compare entries by grepping out some common
> >>>substring.
> >>Could you give an example of the sort of thing you wish to do?
> >e.g. grep for a function name and check that all the matches have the
> >same volatility.
>
> I think grep will be the wrong tool for this format, but if we're settling
> on a perl format, a few perl one-liners should be able to work pretty well.
> It might be worth shipping a small perl module that provided some functions,
> or a script doing common tasks (or both).

I was going to say the same thing. We need to make sure that the output
format of those oneliners is consistent, though -- it wouldn't be nice
if adding one column with nondefault value to a dozen of entries changes
the formatting of other entries. For example, perhaps declare that the
order of entries is alphabetical or it matches something declared at the
start of the file.

From that POV, I don't like the idea of having multiple columns for a
sigle entry in a single line; adding more columns means that eventually
we're going to split lines that have become too long in a different
place, which would reformat the whole file; not very nice. But maybe
this doesn't matter if we decree that changing the column split is a
manual chore rather than automatic, because then it can be done in a
separate mechanical commit after the extra column is added.

BTW one solution to the merge problem is to have unique separators for
each entry. For instance, instead of

} -- this is the end of the previous entry
,
{
oid = 2233,
proname = array_append,

we could have
} # array_prepend 2232
,
} # array_append 2233
oid = 2233,
proname = array_append,

where the funcname-oid comment is there to avoid busted merges. The
automatic editing tools make sure that those markers are always present.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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