Re: [HACKERS] Re: NOT {NULL|DEFERRABLE} (was: bug in 7.0)

On Tue, 29 Feb 2000, Don Baccus wrote:

> Because of this, the web toolkit I'm porting is going out with
> 6.5 only, rather than 6.5 or 7.0 beta with 7.0 beta recommended.
> It's a pity, bugs and some of our hacks around missing features
> in 6.5 make portions of the toolkit differ in their output than
> the Oracle version. This hurts the credibility of the port,
> to some degree, and simply adds ammunition to those who argue
> that trying to do this kind of project on top of Postgres is
> foolishness incarnate.

It's BETA. You're not supposed to use it in production work. Beta is a
feature freeze, then we try to sort out the bugs.

As far as I'm concerned it would hurt credibility of the port much more to
"recommend" a beta version of a database server as its backend. If you
need 7.0 for your port then you should have waited a month. While I agree
that the parser "fixes" were less than ideal, we're not primarily
developing PostgreSQL to work with your toolkit.

> I actually did the unrolling of the worst cases last night, took
> me about an hour with "Star Trek Voyager" on in the background
> as a distraction from how ugly this hack is. Because, with all
> due respect, Thomas, it is an exceedingly ugly hack. And you
> can't unroll enough to capture the grammar anyway, it's like
> trying to enumerate all possible expressions in the grammar
> rather than parse the general form.

The difference is that the expression space is infinite, whereas unrolling
all column constraints should be on the order of a dozen or two. Better
ideas are welcome of course.

--
Peter Eisentraut Sernanders väg 10:115
peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net 75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/ Sweden