Re: pg_get_*_ddl() needs a redesign

On Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 11:58 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Maybe --quote-all-identifiers should be the default? I don't think
> that we break old syntax "pretty regularly" in any other way.
> But that's a side point.

It's possible it's been less in recent years, but I feel like that's
just the most common way, like you know 50% of the total breakage or
something.

> I'm not quite convinced. But if that's really the case, I'm voting
> for "discard the feature". It's not useful enough to justify doubling
> the maintenance load associated with DDL reconstruction.

I think what really bothers me here is the chances of silent breakage,
which appear to be high. If it were somehow the case that adding a new
feature to some kind of DDL object, like a FLAVOR banana option to
CREATE TABLE, were likely to produce test failures until the
corresponding code was updated, I don't think that would be bad. It
would just be one more small step that everyone extending a DDL
command would have to do. But as it is, I don't think anything would
alert you to the oversight. That's likely to lead to a lot of future
headaches as we discover that things have been broken for years
without anybody noticing. Or maybe in the LLM era we'll just get a
flood of post-commit reports pointing out the problem. But that still
leads to us playing catch-up, which is not a good situation.

--
Robert Haas