Re: Proposal to introduce a shuffle function to intarray extension

On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 8:36 PM Martin Kalcher
<martin(dot)kalcher(at)aboutsource(dot)net> wrote:
> I would like to see a function like this inside the intarray extension.
> Is there any way to get to this point? How is the process to deal with
> such proposals?

Hi Martin,

I'm redirecting this to the pgsql-hackers@ mailing list, where we talk
about code. For the archives, Martin's initial message to -general
was:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/9d160a44-7675-51e8-60cf-6d64b76db831%40aboutsource.net

The first question is whether such a thing belongs in an external
extension, or in the contrib/intarray module. The latter seems like a
reasonable thing to want to me. The first step towards that will be
to get your code into .patch format, as in git format-patch or git
diff, that can be applied to the master branch.

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch

Some initial feedback from me: I'd recommend adding a couple of
comments to the code, like the algorithm name for someone who wants to
read more about it (I think it's a Fisher-Yates shuffle?). You'll
need to have the contrib/intarrays/intarray--1.5--1.6.sql file that
creates the function. You might want to add something to
control/intarray/sql/_int.sql that invokes the function when you run
make check in there (but doesn't display the results, since that'd be
unstable across machines?), just to have 'code coverage' (I mean, it'd
prove it doesn't crash at least). Once details are settled, you'd
also want to add documentation in doc/src/sgml/intarray.sgml. I
understand that this is a specialised int[] shuffle, but I wonder if
someone would ever want to have a general array shuffle, and how that
would work, in terms of naming convention etc.