Re: pg14 psql broke \d datname.nspname.relname

On Mon, Mar 21, 2022 at 9:32 PM Mark Dilger
<mark(dot)dilger(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> [ new patch version ]

This patch adds three new arguments to processSQLNamePattern() and
documents one of them. It adds three new parameters to
patternToSQLRegex() as well, and documents none of them. I think that
the text of the comment might need some updating too, in particular
the sentence "Additional dots in the name portion are not treated as
special."

There are no comments explaining the left_is_literal stuff. It appears
that your intention here is that if the pattern string supplied by the
user contains any of *?|+()[]{}.^\ not surrounded by double-quotes, we
signal the caller. Some callers then use this to issue a complaint
that the database name must be a literal. To me, this behavior doesn't
really make sense. If something is a literal, that means we're not
going to interpret the special characters that it contains. Here, we
are interpreting the special characters just so we can complain that
they exist. It seems to me that a simpler solution would be to not
interpret them at all. I attach a patch showing what I mean by that.
It just rips out the dbname_is_literal stuff in favor of doing nothing
at all. To put the whole thing another way, if the user types "\d
}.public.ft", your code wants to complain about the fact that the user
is trying to use regular expression characters in a place where they
are not allowed to do that. I argue that we should instead just be
comparing "}" against the database name and see whether it happens to
match.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com