Re: [DOCS] Re: FE/BE protocol revision patch

> > 1. Implement addition of atttypmod field to RowDescriptor messages.
> >    The client-side code is there but ifdef'd out.  I have no idea
> >    what to change on the backend side.  The field should be sent
> >    only if protocol >= 2.0, of course.

Hmm. I was hoping to do something in the backend to allow data types
like numeric(p,s) which take multiple qualifying arguments (in this
case, precision and scale). One possibility was to shoehorn both fields
into the existing atttypmod 16-bit field.

Seems like atttypmod is now being used for things outside of the
backend, but I'm not sure how to support these other uses with these
other possible data types.

A better general approach to the type qualifier problem might be to
define a variable-length data type which specifies column
characteristics, and then pass that around. For character strings, it
would have one field, and for numeric() and decimal() it would have two.

Comments? Ideas??

                      - Tom