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

At 05:54 AM 2/29/00 +0000, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

>I did not claim to have the final form; I ran out of time before
>heading out on vacation.

In retrospect, it shouldn't've gone into the beta at that point,
then.  Crippling "unique not null" isn't merely an inconvenience.
Dropping a bomb like this into beta the night before release
and leaving town for nine days perhaps wasn't the best thing to
do.   Perhaps we should avoid doing things like this in the future.

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 REALLY a pity because the Feb 18th snapshot I took and
tested, like earlier ones, was really solid.  The toolkit was
looking great with the snapshot.

>istm that solving the general case by
>unrolling clauses should not be exhaustively difficult.

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.

I ran into another problem, though, and presumed it was because
of my hacking.  So I decided to roll back gram.y to the Feb
18 snapshot, did a clean/make of the parser, rebuilt and reinstalled,
and the thing still segtrapped on me.  

I don't have time to dig deeper at the moment.  I'll look later
tonight.  It would take me about 15 minutes to recreate my
additional unrolling clauses, as well, but I'm hoping Tom was
serious about taking the time to do it right as unrolling is
NOT a solution.

What's wrong with actually accepting the SQL92 grammar, anyway?

> I will
>continue to pursue this as time permits.

"as time permits"?  This implies we live with an unusable beta
in the interim?



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