Re: \d type queries - why not views in system catalog?!?

What should we do with the TODO item?  Add question mark? Remove?

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> > Robert Treat writes:
> >> One idea I've always thought would be nice would be to make full fledged
> >> C functions out of the \ commands and ship them with the database.
> 
> > The psql meta-commands are not a nicely designed set of queries that one
> > would encapsulate into a public library interface.  They are created for
> > interactive use, representing precomposed views of the database that are
> > thought to be useful.  If the ideas of usefulness change, then the
> > commands might change.
> 
> I think that the proposal is to take describe.c more or less
> lock-stock-and-barrel out of psql and put it in the backend instead.
> It doesn't matter whether the views are orthogonal or useful for
> non-interactive purposes; they're defined to do whatever we think
> psql should show.
> 
> The question is whether this gives us a useful amount of decoupling of
> psql from the backend version.  Certainly the describe.c code is the
> stuff most subject to breakage across versions, but there are a lot of
> other aspects of psql that could still break.  One fairly obvious
> example of backend-dependent psql code that won't be helped this way is
> the tab completion code.
> 
> While I don't have any strong objection to moving the guts of these
> queries to the backend, I can't get real excited about it either;
> I suspect that psql will still be pretty version-dependent.
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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