Re: Dubious usage of TYPCATEGORY_STRING

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> On 02.12.21 22:22, Tom Lane wrote:
>> My first thought about fixing point 1 was to put "char" into some
>> other typcategory, but that turns out to break some of psql's
>> catalog queries, with results like:
>>
>> regression=# \dp
>> ERROR: operator is not unique: unknown || "char"
>> LINE 16: E' (' || polcmd || E'):'
>> ^
>> HINT: Could not choose a best candidate operator. You might need to add explicit type casts.

> Could we add explicit casts (like polcmd::text) here? Or would it break
> too much?

I assumed it'd break too much to consider doing that. But I suppose
that since a typcategory change would be initdb-forcing anyway, maybe
it's not out of the question. I'll investigate and see exactly how
many places would need an explicit cast.

regards, tom lane