Re: Patch proposal: New hooks in the connection path

Joe Conway <mail(at)joeconway(dot)com> writes:
> It isn't clear to me if having a hook in the timeout handler is a
> nonstarter -- perhaps a comment with suitable warning for prospective
> extension authors is enough? Anyone else want to weigh in on this issue
> specifically?

It doesn't seem like a great place for a hook, because the list of stuff
you could safely do there would be mighty short, possibly the empty set.
Write to shared memory? Not too safe. Write to a file? Even less.
Write to local memory? Pointless, because we're about to _exit(1).
Pretty much anything I can think of that you'd want to do is something
we've already decided the core code can't safely do, and putting it
in a hook won't make it safer.

If someone wants to argue for this hook, I'd like to see a credible
example of a *safe* use-case, keeping in mind the points raised in
the comments in BackendInitialize and process_startup_packet_die.

regards, tom lane