Re: Do we need use more meaningful variables to replace 0 in catalog head files?

On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 10:47 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:

> Yeah, that's the thread I remembered. I think the basic conclusion was
> that we needed a Perl script that would suck up a bunch of data from some
> representation that's more edit-friendly than the DATA lines, expand
> symbolic representations (regprocedure etc) into numeric OIDs, and write
> out the .bki script from that. I thought some people had volunteered to
> work on that, but we've seen no results ...
>

If there are no barriers to adding it to our toolchain, could that
more-edit-friendly representation be a SQLite database?

I'm not suggesting we store a .sqlite file in our repo. I'm suggesting that
we store the dump-restore script in our repo, and the program that
generates the .bki script would query the generated SQLite db.

From that initial dump, any changes to pg_proc.h would be appended to the
dumped script

...

/* add new frombozulation feature */

ALTER TABLE pg_proc_template ADD frombozulator text;
/* bubbly frombozulation is the default for volatile functions */
UPDATE pg_proc_template SET frombozulator = 'bubbly' WHERE provolatile =
'v';

/* proposed new function */

INSERT INTO pg_proc_template(proname,proleakproof) VALUES ("new_func",'f');

That'd communicate the meaning of our changes rather nicely. A way to eat
our own conceptual dogfood.

Eventually it'd get cluttered and we'd replace the populate script with a
fresh ".dump". Maybe we do that as often as we reformat our C code.

I think Stephen Frost suggested something like this a while back, but I
couldn't find it after a short search.