Re: Allowing extensions to find out the OIDs of their member objects

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 9:46 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Perhaps this also gives some impetus to the lets-use-identifiers-
> not-numbers approach that Andrew was pushing. I didn't care for
> that too much so far as an extension's own internal references
> are concerned, but for cross-extension references it seems a
> lot better to be looking for "postgis / function_foo_int_int"
> than for "postgis / 3".

Yeah, I agree. I think names are a good idea. I also agree with the
other comments that trying to run an OID registry will not work out
well. Either we'll accept every request for an OID range and go nuts
tracking them all as they rapidly balloon -- or more likely we'll
reject requests from insufficiently-famous extensions which will, of
course, hinder their attempts to become famous. It seems much better
to come up with a solution where every extension can DTRT without any
central coordination. Perhaps if we replaced OIDs with UUIDs that
would Just Work, but an OID-mapping system seems like a good, perhaps
better, answer as well.

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