Re: automatically generating node support functions

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> What do people think about this patch now?

I'm in favor of moving forward with this. I do not like the
libclang-based approach that Andres was pushing, because of the
jump in developer tooling requirements that it'd cause.

Eyeballing the patch a bit, I do have some comments:

* It's time for action on the business about extracting comments
from the to-be-deleted code.

* The Perl script is kind of under-commented for my taste.
It lacks a copyright notice, too.

* In the same vein, I should not have to reverse-engineer what
the available pg_node_attr() properties are or do. Perhaps they
could be documented in the comment for the pg_node_attr macro
in nodes.h.

* Maybe the generated file names could be chosen less opaquely,
say ".funcs" and ".switch" instead of ".inc1" and ".inc2".

* I don't understand why there are changes in the #include
lists in copyfuncs.c etc?

* I think that more thought needs to be put into the format
of the *nodes.h struct declarations, because I fear pgindent
is going to make a hash of what you've done here. When we
did similar stuff in the catalog headers, I think we ended
up moving a lot of end-of-line comments onto their own lines.

* I assume the pg_config_manual.h changes are not meant for
commit?

regards, tom lane