Re: Bootstrap DATA is a pita

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 9:42 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> 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?
>
> On that angle, I'm dubious that a format that allows omission of fields is
> going to be easy for editing scripts to modify, no matter what the layout
> convention is. I've found it relatively easy to write sed or even Emacs
> macros to add new column values to old-school pg_proc.h ... but in this
> brave new world, I'm going to be really hoping that the column default
> works for 99.9% of pg_proc entries when we add a new pg_proc column,
> because slipping a value into a desired position is gonna be hard for
> a script when you don't know whether the adjacent existing fields are
> present or not.

I wonder if we should have a tool in our repository to help people
edit the file. So instead of going in there yourself and changing
things by hand, or writing your own script, you can do:

updatepgproc.pl --oid 5678 provolatile=v

or

updatepgpproc.pl --name='.*xact.*' prowhatever=someval

Regardless of what format we end up with, that seems like it would
make things easier.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company