Re: split tablecmds.c

On 2025-Dec-01, Nathan Bossart wrote:

> This file has over 22,000 lines and is too large to be included in GitHub's
> code search results [0]. It appears to have been given its current form in
> 2002 by commit 71dc300. Previously, it was named command.c, which dates
> back to the 80s. Is it time to split it into a few different files,
> similar to what was done to copy.c in 2020 by commit c532d15?
>
> After briefly skimming through it, some areas that seem like they could
> potentially be moved out are partitions, constraints, permission checks,
> inheritance, foreign keys, column expressions, table rewriting, attribute
> merging, TRUNCATE, and CREATE TABLE. This is far from a concrete proposal,
> but I first wanted to gauge interest in $SUBJECT.

I think it makes sense. It's our largest source file at 690kB
the second being pg_dump.c (at 625kB) and also a candidate for
splitting. The third one, ruleutils.c, is slightly above half size,
381kB!

My first thought would be to move code that deals with catalog changes
to files in catalog/. Also a couple of functions related to tablespaces
could be perhaps be moved to commands/tablespace.c.

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"El Maquinismo fue proscrito so pena de cosquilleo hasta la muerte"
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