Re: [HACKERS] Column ADDing issues

On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 12:52:43PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > > I suggest you be very cautious about messing with ALTER TABLE until you
> > > understand why inheritance makes it such a headache ;-)
> > 
> > I'm just trying to get the defaults and constraints working. If
> > inheritance stays broken the way it previously was, it's beyond my
> > powers. But I get the feeling that people rather not alter their tables
> > unless they have *perfect* alter table commands. I don't feel like arguing
> > with them, they'll just have to do without then.
> 
> OK, so am I hearing we don't want ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN without it
> working for inhertance.  Is this really the way we want things?  May as
> well disable ADD COLUMN too because that doesn't work for inheritance
> either.

Bruce, I hope your playing devil's advocate here. What I'm hearing,
from this discussion, is a number of people interested in getting psql's
object features defined in a useful way. As far as impacting Peter's work
on getting ALTER commands working, I hope he understands that getting
the commands working for the SQL92 case, and leaving inheritance broken
(as it currently is) is far preferable to holding off for the *perfect*
problem definition. I interpreted his last sentence to mean "they'll
just have to do without *perfect* alter table commands", not "I'm not
going to work on this at all anymore". At least, I sure that's what I
hope he means :-)

If you meant the later, Peter, let me say that, in my opinion, very
few people are currently using postgres's inheritence features, and are
already having to manage with the broken state they're in. I'm glad to
see interest in improving them, but I see that as post 7.0 work. Heck,
If Oliver & Co. come up with an interesting, consistent object model,
that'd be reason enough for an 8.0 release. ;-) (No, please, not another
version number thread!) Certainly might be worth a long range development
fork in the CVS, at least.

Ross

-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005